표지이미지

요약설명

The Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ) serves as the official border and the buffer zone between North Korea and South Korea. It has secured the competing sovereignties of the two nations for more than 65 years, since the 1953 armistice that suspended, but did not end, the Korean War. Despite its name, the DMZ is, in fact, heavily militarized, with more than 1 million landmines scattered within the 4 km-wide band, and it is also surrounded by more than a million heavily armed troops to the north and south. It has been framed in conventional military terms as crucial to “keeping the peace,” even as it continues to represent the pain of national division and the traumas of the longest war in modern history. When rare and endangered species were discovered in areas within and alongside the DMZ in the 1990s, the zone’s powerful symbolism took on a new guise—representing nature’s resilience in the face of unending war. In the context of interKorean relations, policy makers in South Korea began to envision the “peaceful utilization” (p’yonghwajeok iyong) of the DMZ’s nature––using it as a vehicle through which North-South cooperation might be augmented o r advanced. Ecologists, who had been studying the area since the mid-1960s, began to gain more access to state funding and areas for research, and environmentalists began to focus on areas south of the DMZ, which were experiencing unprecedented development, largely connected to ecotourism and the state’s resignification of the DMZ as the “Peace and Life Zone.“ The total area of the DMZ and the CCZ together is approximately 1557 square kilometers, which comprises just 1.6 percent of the total South Korean territory. Yet the 24,325 species that have been documented there represent 20 percent of the total species that exist in South Korea. Given the widespread ecological and economic degradation of North Korea, and the intensive overdevelopment of the south, scientists estimate that the majority of the peninsula’s biodiversity exists within o r near the DMZ. My book frames the DMZ and its rare ecology as exemplary of “de/militarized ecologies.” I argue that they deserve scholarly attention because they not only bring militarization more squarely into historical and cultural analyses of the Anthropocene they also help us to see that spaces like the DMZ, which are produced out of conjoined processes of militarization and privatization, are more normative than exceptional. The framework of de/militarized ecologies also offers a posthumanist approach to Cold War cultural studies, which are primarily preoccupied with human-centered cultural memory and (post)colonial politics.