Necro citizens

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"This double volume publication includes the first publications of a poetical cycle by the Korean-American poet Jennifer Kwon Dobbs and its German translation by Students of University Bielefeld, Gruppe Bie. Its title is inspired from Giorgio Agamban's scholarship on Necropolitics and the poet and critic Joyelle McSweeney's writing on the Necropastoral--a genre of the pastoral than imagines nature in the throes of 'ecological endtimes.' Kwon Dobbs drawn on both ideas in order to name the cultural conditions and linguistic violence that create what she has named 'necro citizens'--persons of Korean heritage who are marked by the government as 'social dead' and yet who are crucial to the U.S. military complex in South Korea. These persons worked in the U.S. camptowns as sex workers, cooks, staff, and boy mascots, and they created intimacies between South Korea and the United States that were (and remain) vital to the unending Korean War. The poems of this publication write against these cultural conditions and this linguistic violence. While identities are implicated, they are not the author's chief concern. However, Kwon Dobbs is not writing her autobiography and family history. Instead, as a poet, she is interested in demilitarizing the imagination that plunders and disposes of Korean bodies--whether through social stigma, forgetting, or forced removals through intercountry adoption and deportation to an adoptee's birth country--in the name of national security. The backslashes used in the poems serve as way to punctuate a fragment break while at the same time splicing together contexts or making them visible in language. While Korean words in the poems kept in Korean script serve to create a moment of halt, a linguistic 'point zero, ' cultural and historical notes are included at the end of the chapbooks."--Page 3