Death Without End: Korea and the Thanatographics of War

The Korean War was never formally declared, and no peace treaty ending the war was ever signed. The 1953 armistice did not stop the war but marked its extension and expansion into a warlike state of emergency. How did the new reality of life under armistice shape visions of the possible in North and South Korea? What meanings are attached to deaths in a so-called ＂limited war＂ that turned out to be limitless? What does the lack of an end to the Korean War reveal about the nature of war in the post-1945 era?

Theodore Hughes crosses borders to demonstrate how stories of dying and death--what he calls the thanatographic imagination--in North Korea, the United States, and South Korea energize ideas about history, the present, and the future. Death Without End shows how literary texts, films, nonfiction, and other forms of cultural production from the late 1940s to the 1960s give rise to revolutionary belongings, gendered selfhoods, and anticommunist cosmopolitanisms as they address the incommensurate loss of life, violence, destruction, and suffering of the war. Hughes also traces how the Korean War entered US popular culture in unexpected but enduring ways. Bridging Korean studies, American studies, and the cultural turn in international relations, this book offers new ways to understand the unending Korean War and the global implications of its logic of limitlessness.

Theodore Hughes is Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author of Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (Columbia, 2012).