Anointed Citizenship: Christianity and Border Crossers in Wartime South Korea
Wednesday, April 19, 2023
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM EDT
Hybrid Event
In Person, Room 505, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University
Virtual via Zoom
Event Description
Who can become a good citizen? Why and how does religion determine the answer? These questions emerged with violent urgency in wartime South Korea at the height of American military and moral power on the peninsula. During the Korean War (1950–53), the moral politics of Christianity scripted an enduring pledge of allegiance for North Korean border crossers during their flight or defection to US-led “Free” South Korea. In this lecture, Park presents two wartime narratives of Christian border crossing from her book project: deliverance (refugees) and conversion (prisoners of war). She pivots from churches and revival tents to roadblocks and barbed wire guarded by the US military to show the intersection of war, religion, and empire, as the global Cold War engendered violent conditions of inclusion and exclusion across East Asia and beyond. By reexamining the “success” of Christianity in (South) Korea as a wartime story, Park’s research contributes to larger discussions of the role religion plays in the formation of modern nation-states and empires.
Speaker
Sandra Park is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the George Washington University Institute for Korean Studies (GWIKS). She is a historian of modern Korea, the US empire, and the global Cold War. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Anointed Citizenship: The Politics of Christian Border Crossing in Cold War Korea. Drawing on extensive archival research across government, military, and missionary archives, her book project examines the coherence of Christian moral politics as a pledge of allegiance for North Korean border crossers petitioning for citizenship in “Free” South Korea under the US military empire. Her project traces the cross-border movements of Christians and transpacific circulations of Christian political claims during and immediately after the Korean War, contributing to existing literatures on North Korean migrants and citizenship, religion and the global Cold War, and US-Korean relations in the twentieth century.
Moderator
Gregg A. Brazinsky is Professor of History and International Affairs and Deputy Director of GW Institute for Korean Studies. His research seeks to understand the diverse and multi-faceted interactions among East Asian states and between Asia and the United States. He is the author of Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry during the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). He served as Interim Director of the GW Institute for Korean Studies during the Spring 2017 semester.
