Thursday, March 18th, 2010 Korea: War Without End

Description

The Korean War is probably the least understood war of the twentieth century. Scholars of the war cannot even agree upon the war’s origins. Was it a local war whose origins lay in the nationalist ambitions Kim Il Sung? A civil war between two radically opposing visions of political order for the peninsula? Or was it an international war whose origins lay with Stalin and communisms’ design for world domination? Different historians’ account of the war’s origins is like, in the words of the historian Robert Beisner, “walking through a revolving door.” The purpose of this talk is to not to interject new arguments into these already crowded disputes about origins and endings, but rather to investigate the inadequately explored “middle,” that is, the war as an on-going conflict. Specifically, we will examine how this “unfinished” war, and changing memories of it, has influenced regional and world events to the present day.

Sheila Miyoshi Jager is an Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College. She is the author of “Narratives of Nation-Building in Korea: A Genealogy of Patriotism” and (with Rana Mitter) “Ruptured Histories: War, Memory and the Post-Cold War in Asia”. In 2006-8 she was a Visiting Professor of National Security Studies at the Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College where she worked on issues relating to historical memory and national security. She is currently finishing up a book about the Korean War.