Redefining U.S. Military Camptowns: Reviewing Keum Bowoon’s “Bases' Expansion and Borderland of Life”
The long-term impact of American military presence in “host” countries around the world in the second half of the twentieth century has been the subject of sustained scholarly attention for decades. In this time, various approaches from diplomatic analyses in security studies to gendered critiques in cultural studies have unveiled how local communities have been affected by the global Cold War proliferation of US military bases. Korean Studies scholarship has not only followed this intellectual trend but spearheaded a broader analysis of the gendered dimensions of US military base culture through interdisciplinary and transnational critiques that extend local structures beyond the Korean peninsula. Building on Katherine H.S. Moon (1997)’s pioneering interrogation of the gendered consequences of foreign policies on women in Korean camptowns, research by scholars like Seungsook Moon and Maria Höhn (2010) have expanded into comparative transnational perspectives on the multifaceted experiences of local communities. Their comparison of South Korea, Japan and Okinawa, and West Germany, recently translated into Korean (2017), elucidates the parallel but distinct configuration of liminal spaces by US military bases around the world. Bowoon Keum’s innovative efforts to reconceptualize the political dynamics and lived experience of US military camptowns in Korea adds to and promises to further enrich this thriving field of research on the local disposition of South Koreans under the US military base system.
