Memories of My Ghost Brother by Heinz Insu Fenkl

Insu's father's racist discrimination, as well as neighbors' misdeeds, incessantly wounded the protagonist Insu, a son of a YangKongju and an American GI. Like the protagonist Insu's cousin Gannan, who became a prostitute and then committed suicide, many Korean women at that time struggled against Confucian sexism, and American racism added to this gendered burden and forced Korean sex workers, YangKongjus to kill themselves or their own babies, or at least give them up for adoption, when GIs who might marry the women did not accept their babies. As expected, there are serious corruptions, perversions, sexual abuses, black-market transactions, infanticides, racist adoptions, and disastrous and appalling deaths into the camptown where necropolitics operates, while the Korean government casts its people aside, as the poverty-stricken villagers desperately pursue money flown in with the U.S.

From a Freudian perspective, this work focuses on the concept of “necropolitics,” describing social and political power that dictates the death or life of people.

This article examines the properties of econo-political power exercised in a military camptown shortly after the Korean War, and the negative impact of that power on the villagers' lives, as revealed in Fenkl's novel Memories of My Ghost Brother.

Memories of My Ghost Brother by Heinz Insu Fenkl