The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War : The Untold History / Monica Kim.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kim, Monica, Author.

Series:

Princeton scholarship online.

Princeton scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Korean War, 1950-1953.

Korean War, 1950-1953--Armistices.

Korean War, 1950-1953--Prisoners and prisons.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (453 pages)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

A groundbreaking look at how the interrogation rooms of the Korean War set the stage for a new kind of battle-not over land but over human subjectsTraditional histories of the Korean War have long focused on violations of the thirty-eighth parallel, the line drawn by American and Soviet officials in 1945 dividing the Korean peninsula. But The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War presents an entirely new narrative, shifting the perspective from the boundaries of the battlefield to inside the interrogation room. Upending conventional notions of what we think of as geographies of military conflict, Monica Kim demonstrates how the Korean War evolved from a fight over territory to one over human interiority and the individual human subject, forging the template for the U.S. wars of intervention that would predominate during the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond.Kim looks at how, during the armistice negotiations, the United States and their allies proposed a new kind of interrogation room: one in which POWs could exercise their "free will" and choose which country they would go to after the ceasefire. The global controversy that erupted exposed how interrogation rooms had become a flashpoint for the struggles between the ambitions of empire and the demands for decolonization, as the aim of interrogation was to produce subjects who attested to a nation's right to govern. The complex web of interrogators and prisoners-Japanese-American interrogators, Indian military personnel, Korean POWs and interrogators, and American POWs-that Kim uncovers contradicts the simple story in U.S. popular memory of "brainwashing" during the Korean War.Bringing together a vast range of sources that track two generations of people moving between three continents, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War delves into an essential yet overlooked aspect of modern warfare in the twentieth century.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Note on Language

Abbreviations

Introduction. War and Humanity

1. Interrogation

2. The Prisoner of War

3. The Interrogator

4 Koje Island: A Mutiny, or Revolution

5. Below the 38th Parallel: Between Barbed Wire and Blood

6. On the 38th Parallel: The Third Choice

7. Above the 38th Parallel: The US Citizen- POW

Conclusion: The Diaspora of War

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Also issued in print: 2019.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780691185040

0691185042

OCLC:

1066194550