In 2017, the Seoul Museum of History presented a special exhibition on Yongsan Garrison, the oldest U.S. army installation in South Korea that is now in the process of being returned to the Korean government. The exhibit presented Yongsan Garrison as once-“forbidden land” was being rightfully returned and restored as a South Korean national park. However, the obsoletion of the military base evokes feelings of loss for base residents who have called Yongsan Garrison home during the past sixty years. If simultaneous histories of occupation and of home exist in the same space, then who does Yongsan belong to, and who belongs to it? This question grows increasingly important as the construction of Yongsan Park continues and issues of memorialization and narrative-making move from the realm of discussion into concrete reality, as evidenced by the land return of over a dozen U.S. military sites to South Korea in December of 2020. While existing scholarship has addressed the consequences of U.S. military presence in South Korea, and an emerging line of scholarship has begun to illuminate the histories of military dependents in places such as Germany and Japan, there has yet to be a comprehensive and humanizing study of the sixty-year-old base community at Yongsan Garrison. Alongside interviews and the inspection of photograph collections archived by Yongsan Garrison residents, I expand on existing methodologies to illuminate this base community as a group with deep roots in the Yongsan site, and who cannot be left unaccounted for in the Yongsan Garrison transferal process. This thesis concludes by looking at the Yongsan Legacy Project, a virtual archive for Korean and American stories, as a model for future academic, political, and public interactions with the Yongsan site and the narratives it holds.
Ryu, Karis,
"A New Park, a Lost Town: Defining the Legacy of U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan"
(2021).
History Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/mnh5-1r71
