Border crossings between decolonization and the Cold War

This chapter examines the literary trope of crossing the thirty-eighth parallel in some of the Korean literary works published immediately after the end of colonization, revisiting two prevalent academic stances in reading post-Liberation literature: the overwhelming Cold War framework and the emphasis on discontinuity between pre-1945 and post-1945. The act of border crossing portrayed in literature is not about choosing one regime over the other—subject to the Manichean Cold War divide—but rather about refusing to choose, a repudiation and critique of the Cold War binary itself. The chapter calls attention to the mid-century writers’ decolonization project against the emerging Cold War on the Korean Peninsula.