Abstract

This article rethinks Korean and global anticommunism through an analysis of the Seosan Pioneer Corps (1961–1966), a land reclamation project and vagrant penal colony sustained for years by the delivery and misappropriation of US agricultural surpluses. In the past decade, the Seosan settlement has resurfaced in public discourse as a forgotten scandal of forced labor and marriage. This essay begins by noting a formal correspondence between recent exposés of the settlement and the Cold War anticommunist tropes that undergirded its existence, notably the unmasking of the vagrant as a communist in disguise. While contemporary narratives of burial and exhumation imply that public ignorance was a precondition of the violence, a wide reading of 1960s media points to the settlement’s remarkable visibility in popular and intellectual culture. Public knowledge and participation, the article argues, helped facilitate the mobilization of settlers to Seosan and other pioneer corps projects, a movement enabled by both an injunction to mass vigilance vis-à-vis the vagrant as potential communist and the visual inscription of this figure in a legible domestic order. Media spectacles documented this newfound domesticity in detail, disclosing not only geographical coordinates and architectural dimensions but also violence and coercion. Anticommunism, then, functioned less to obscure violence than to sever the settlement from its social and material foundations. Countering this ideological move, the article’s last section reconstructs an alternative genealogy of the settlement from a recent volume of oral histories, in which the pioneer corps appears as a continuation of wartime refuge and a structural outcome of Cold War aid flows.