Korea Under Martial Law and US Occupation

Catalog description

In December 2024, the President of South Korea announced emergency martial law. Familiar with the repressive and deadly impacts of martial law, Koreans on the peninsula and in the diaspora watched the news aghast. The brief martial law decree and subsequent mass mobilizations also caught the attention of international news. This course puts the martial law declaration and the continuing, looming threat of further declarations, into the context of South Korea’s neocolonial status under US military occupation. We will study the past and present of the Korean War, which despite the 1953 armistice and ceasefire continues without an official end or peace treaty and affects every aspect of Korean life, culture, democracy, and geopolitics. We will also study past instances of Korean martial law and resistance to it. We will be in dialogue with anti-war activists who have worked to end the Korean War, looking to demilitarize and decolonize the peninsula, reunify separated families, and hold US imperialism accountable for civilian massacres and its interference in Korean self-determination. In this spirit, students will conduct research and create projects, aimed at making an impact beyond our classroom. Through a close examination of literature, films, state and grassroots archives, art, and armed with the public syllabus curated by the Ending the Korean War Collective, we will learn about the impacts of ongoing war and what writer Marie Myung-Ok Lee meant by “the violence of forgetting.”