The Prison and the Postcolony: Contested Memory and the Museumification of Sŏdaemun Hyŏngmuso

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-67
Author(s):  
Russell Burge
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Japanese Empire ◽  
Political Dissent ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
Run Up ◽  
A Site

Abstract Seoul’s Sŏdaemun Prison is famous in South Korea today as a site of heroic resistance where Korean anticolonial activists were martyred at the hands of Japanese colonial officials. This narrative is complicated, however, by the fact that the prison continued to be used after the fall of the Japanese Empire as a tool to suppress political dissent, right up until its final decommissioning in 1987. This study inquires into the political context surrounding Sŏdaemun Prison’s decommissioning and finds that the decision was made by the Chun Doo Hwan administration in the run-up to the Seoul Olympics and was more concerned with the erasure of contemporaneous political excesses than the preservation of colonial memory. Sŏdaemun Prison’s transformation into a site of colonial tourism in the following decade was carried out as part of a larger move in urban planning to overwrite the memory of the postcolonial authoritarian past, a process that reveals much about the limitations and contradictions of South Korean democratization.

The Origins of the Park Jung-hee Syndrome in South Korea

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (01) ◽  
pp. 1950003
Author(s):  
EUNJUNG CHOI ◽  
JONGSEOK WOO
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Political Socialization ◽  
Empirical Test ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
South Korean ◽  
The Past ◽  
System Output ◽  
The Empirical Analysis

In the past few decades, post-democratization politics in South Korea have witnessed an upsurge in authoritarian nostalgia, called the “Park Jung-hee syndrome.” This paper examines the origins of public nostalgia for the authoritarian dictator by putting two theoretical arguments, i.e., the socialization thesis and the system output thesis, to an empirical test. This paper utilizes the 2010 Korea Democracy Barometer from the Korea Barometer and the 2010 and the 2015 Korean National Identity Survey from the East Asia Institute. The empirical analysis of the South Korean case strongly supports the political socialization argument, suggesting that citizens’ yearning for Park Jung-hee is not merely an outcome of the negative evaluations of the democratic governments’ performances. Rather, their authoritarian nostalgia is in large part an outcome of their political socialization during the Park dictatorship. The analysis implies that, although a resurgence of the Park Jung-hee syndrome in post-democratization South Korea is not expected to derail the country’s route to democratic deepening, it may continue to be a main source of political division in partisan and electoral politics in the future.

Underdevelopment of American Studies in South Korea: Power and Ignorance

2011 ◽  
Vol 18 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 274-294
Author(s):  
Jooyoung Lee
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
English Language ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
Korean Society ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Studying Abroad ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
Institutional Legacies

AbstractThis article asks why the disciplines of American Studies and U.S. history are so markedly underdeveloped in South Korea (Republic of Korea) and what this underdevelopment implies about U.S.-South Korean relations. Under Japanese colonial rule, the study of English in Korea was important for studying abroad, but few students studied America itself. Under American occupation and the following military rule in South Korea, American studies were not attractive to nationalist youth even though the English language remained useful. American cultural diplomacy fostered a small group of Americanists, but university enrollments were small. In the 1980s, Americans were blamed for their support of authoritarian rule. Japanese-trained historians saw American history as too short to be significant, and Japanese institutional legacies were an obstacle. Americans have also been too constricted in imagining who Koreans were, where Korean ambitions lay, and how Korean society worked. In a sense, the very differences between the two nations hindered them from realizing what those differences were.

Rimsky-Korsakov, Snegurochka, and Populism

2018 ◽  
pp. 63-96
Author(s):  
Emily Frey
Keyword(s):  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Cooperation ◽  
The Past ◽  
A Site ◽  
Village Life ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter looks at Rimsky-Korsakov's Snegurochka (The Snow Maiden) in the political context of the era, namely within a particular branch of 1870s populism that extolled “harmonious communal ritual, agrarian prehistory, and the development of individual feeling.” Together, the Snegurochkas of Alexander Ostrovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov offer perhaps the clearest representations in art of the populist notion of the ideal past, depicting the prehistoric village as a site of social cooperation and humane politics. Indeed, in his adaptation of Snegurochka, Rimsky-Korsakov united an idealized vision of the past with the progress of private, inner feeling. Meanwhile, Russia's thick journals of the seventies brimmed with articles by populist thinkers like Nikolai Mikhailovsky and stories about village life by writers such as Gleb Uspensky and Nikolai Zlatovratsky.

The emergence and evolution of International Relations studies in postcolonial South Korea

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Jungmin Seo ◽  
Young Chul Cho
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Colonial Mentality ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Current State ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
Colonial Legacies

Abstract This study investigates how International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline emerged and evolved in South Korea, focusing on the country's peculiar colonial and postcolonial experiences. In the process, it examines why South Korean IR has been so state-centric and positivist (American-centric), while also disclosing the ways in which international history has shaped the current state of IR in South Korea, institutionally and intellectually. It is argued that IR intellectuals in South Korea have largely reflected the political arrangement of their time, rather than demonstrate academic independence or leadership for its government and/or civil society, as they have navigated difficult power structures in world politics. Related to this, it reveals South Korean IR's twisted postcoloniality, which is the absence – or weakness – of non-Western Japanese colonial legacies in its knowledge production/system, while its embracing the West/America as an ideal and better model of modernity for South Korea's security and development. It also reveals that South Korean IR's recent quest for building a Korean School of IR to overcome its Western dependency appears to be in operation within a colonial mentality towards mainstream American IR.

scholarly journals From Legibility to Eligibility: Politics, Subsidy and Productivity in Rural Asia

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Walker
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Agricultural Sector ◽  
Agricultural Productivity ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Productivity Improvement ◽  
Rural People ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThroughout Asia, the relationship between the state and the rural sector has shifted from taxation to subsidy. The political tussles over subsistence between resistant peasants and taxing states, eloquently described by James Scott, have been replaced by a more affluent political dynamic focussed on subsidy and productivity. This article explores this transformation by means of a comparative study of Thailand and South Korea. Like many other countries, Thailand and South Korea have followed the path from taxation to subsidy but Thailand has never successfully addressed its legacy of low agricultural productivity. Contemporary South Korean agriculture, by contrast, is a result of a century-long investment in productivity improvement, in both its taxation and subsidy phases. The interaction between government policy and agricultural productivity has important political implications. Whereas South Korea has made a successful democratic transition and achieved a broad consensus on support for the agricultural sector, Thailand has failed to effectively manage the contemporary dilemmas of exchange between rural people and the state.

scholarly journals The Art of Governance and the Political Grammar of Legitimacy: Tales of the State for a Unified Korea

2002 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Byung-ok Kil
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Real World ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Past ◽  
State Of Affairs

This inquiry demonstrates that the political legitimacy of a certain society is historically determined, reflects specific institutional and contextual features, and employs a variety of meanings. These meanings can describe both a state of affairs and a process that ultimately involves justifications for legitimate agents and socio-political structures. This paper attepmpts to understand how the meanings of political legitimacy are conceptualized in society. As a case study, it questions: What are the conditions for the existence of political legitimacy and how have they been constructed? How is political legitimacy endorsed in South Korea today, and how does it differ from the past? This paper applies a deconstructive theory of political legitimacy that exploresa a distinctively modern style, or 'art of governance' that has an all-encompassing, as well as individualized effect upon its constituencies. By this approach, this paper argues that the concept of unification does not have a solid significance in the real world, but rather, it is an imaginary idea imposed by the dominant elite class, which is constantly imposed, reinterpreted and transformed in its political context.

scholarly journals Dynastic aura: Proximity to the powerful and its promise in corporate South Korea

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-266
Author(s):  
Michael M. Prentice
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Business Groups ◽  
Top Executives ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Holding Company ◽  
Corporate Form ◽  
High Level ◽  
A Site ◽  
Generational Succession ◽  
New Generation

This article discusses the experiences of high-level managers at a South Korean conglomerate named ‘Sangdo’ who worked within the corporate group’s head office under the owner-executive family. These highly credentialled professionals were attracted to the idea of working directly under or alongside an elite, wealthy corporate dynasty who both owned the conglomerate and were its top executives. Rather than seeing this as a site of inherent conflict between the familial and the professional, I describe how the idea of working alongside and for such elites was enhanced by a ‘dynastic aura’. Through the concept of dynastic aura, I highlight how, in South Korea, families that own business groups are objects of public fascination, particularly as indicators of the future of the economy. In the context of Sangdo, I describe how managers were drawn to the potential of working with a new generation of Sangdo ownership, who sought to centralize and systematize expertise within a holding company. I show how this aura figuratively wore off for managers as they came to understand that ownership was just as entangled in the corporate form – not necessarily above or outside of it – as they were. The article highlights how certain aspects of kinship (such as dynasties and generational succession) still animate capitalist labour, even for non-family members. Additionally, the article calls attention to the way that actors engage with and understand powerful actors in their own right, going beyond accounts of anthropologists’ own direct encounters with the powerful.

South Korea in 2004: Peninsular Flux

Asian Survey ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor D. Cha
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Fundamental Change ◽  
Global War On Terror ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Global War ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The U.S

The variables presaging fundamental change on the Korean Peninsula are many. This assessment of South Korea seeks to lay out the political, economic, and military events of 2004 and their relationship to South Korean grand strategy. It also seeks to analyze the linkages between Seoul's grand strategy and the U.S.-led global war on terror.

Beyond “imagined” nostalgia: Gunsan's heritagization of Japanese colonial architecture in South Korea

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Hyun Kyung Lee
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Municipal Government ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Current Form ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Korean History ◽  
Heritage Sites ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Japanese Colonial

Abstract In South Korea, romanticization of the era of Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945) has long been taboo: the period is widely regarded as one of the most painful and shameful parts of South Korean history. However, during the past decade unexpected cracks have appeared in established national narratives on the colonial period. This paper explores the dissonance between long-standing national narratives and the commodification of local heritage sites for tourism, by examining the heritagization of Japanese colonial architecture in the city of Gunsan. Despite the Gunsan Municipal Government positions the city's colonial stories in ways that largely align with national official narratives on Japanese colonial history, such efforts have unexpectedly generated feelings of imagined nostalgia in three ways: (1) through clashes between official colonial history and the means by which colonial daily life is depicted in Gunsan's Modern Cultural Belt; (2) through the interwoven colonial and post-colonial stories presented in the city's Modern Historic Landscape District and (3) through the commercialized colonial and post-colonial stories articulated by private businesses in Gunsan. This paper suggests that productive nostalgia can help to overcome the limit of the current form of Gunsan's heritagization, and to construct Gunsan's diverse local memories

Technologies Of Self In Contemporary Korea- The Notion Of Suryŏn (修練) In GiCheon (氣天)

2015 ◽  
pp. 76-96
Author(s):  
Victoria Ten
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Individual Experience ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Empirical Material

GiCheon (氣天) is one of many contemporary South Korean mind-body disciplines focused on physical and moral self-cultivation. Utilizing a series of interviews with the adherents of this movement, this paper examines their individual experience and understanding of GiCheon praxis in the new social and political context, revealing the mechanisms of self-construction in modern and post-modern South Korea. Within my analysis of this empirical material, I focus on the notion of Suryŏn (修練, training), often referred to by the interviewees as central to GiCheon. The process and the goal of self-transformation, generally associated with Suryŏn, are further conceptualized within this paper through the framework of “technologies of self ” provided by Michel Foucault.

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