Reenacting Survivors’ Bodies in the No Gun Ri Peace Park

Abstract

The No Gun Ri Peace Park was built in 2012 to honor civilian victims of the No Gun Ri Killings, a wartime atrocity committed by US troops. Survivors and victims’ families had been silenced until Associated Press journalists published their story in 1999 and subsequently earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Investigative Reporting. As a durable war mnemonic in a public site, the park is now performing the critical roles that survivors and victims’ families once carried: witnessing, performing, and transferring trauma to others. This chapter explores not only how the park reenacts survivors’ bodies in communicating a traumatic event that most visitors did not experience directly, but also how it—as a newly constructed sign—negotiates meanings of the No Gun Ri Bridge, the original site of the killings that is located adjacent to the park.