Assistant Professor | Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department
Wesleyan University
Naveen Minai is an assistant professor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. She received her doctorate in gender and sexuality studies from the University of California, Los Angeles (USA) as a Fulbright Scholar. Dr. Minai has held fellowships at Sciences Po (Paris) and the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory at the University of Toronto, Scarborough (Toronto).
Her scholarship thinks through the everyday intimacies of capital, war, and empire through cultural histories, practices, and spaces in reorienting notions of Asia and Asia(n). Dr. Minai’s first manuscript, tentatively titled, Vital Signs: Modern Masculinities in Postcolonial Pakistan,maps a cultural history of the fractured nationhood of Pakistan using an archive of Pakistani male iconography towards situating postcolonial dreams and damages amidst global infrastructures of war, empire, and capital.
Shadows on the Tracks: Seeing Partition and War from Korea to Pakistan
Abstract
The final episode of season 1 of South Korean military action-drama D.P. accumulates in a tragic confrontation on militarized land. While much may be said about trauma (what) and the figure of the soldier (who) in D.P., in this paper, I take up where (space) to think about war, partition, land and visual logics of border and militarization.
Anchoring my analysis in the final episode of D.P Season 1, I move outwards to think about militarized space and deadened land across the partitioned postcolonial space of South/North Korea and India/Pakistan. I locate the partitions of the Korean peninsula and the subcontinent side by side to trace the shadows of how war produces space across two heavily militarized borders on the Asian continent in eerily proximate historical moments in the 20th century—the Korean War and the Partition of 1947.
Mobilizing the Korean War as transnational and transtemporal analytic, I attend to the visual features of militarized occupation of space—tracks, tunnels, barbed wire—across peninsula and subcontinent to activate partition and war as technologies of “geopolitical and biopolitical technologies of the forever wars that convert entire peoples and ecologies into collateral damage” (JV. Kim and S. Kim 2024).
