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Revisiting Minjung: New Perspectives on the Cultural History of 1980s South Korea

2022; Rowman & Littlefield; Volume: 27; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/07311613-9474357

2158-1665

Susan Hwang,

Japanese History and Culture

As a recent publication from the Perspectives on Contemporary Korea series from the University of Michigan Press, Revisiting Minjung: New Perspectives on the Cultural History of 1980s South Korea is a welcome addition to recently expanding scholarship on the authoritarian era. Based on collaborative research of over four years and several international conferences, the collection brings together scholars of various disciplines (history, literature, film, music, gender studies) from Korea, Australia, and the United States to shed new light on the 1980s, a decade of pivotal transformation in South Korean history. The 1980s witnessed the rise of the South Korean populace that brought about the long-awaited transition from dictatorship to democracy, as well as a nationwide labor struggle in which over a million workers participated. These movements were shaped by a constellation of social, political, and cultural forces of the broader minjung (the oppressed) movement. Rather than confining the discussion to storied narratives of collective struggle and liberation, however, Revisiting Minjung engages with themes, subjectivities, and theoretical perspectives that move beyond the familiar oppositional terms (labor vs. capital, state vs. the people, nation vs. class) through which minjung has been articulated at large. The essays in this collection strive to critically reassess the 1980s—often defined in broad strokes as a time of ideological saturation and cultural stagnation—and to illuminate the heterogeneity of the decade’s cultural productions and sociopolitical formations. As editor Sunyoung Park observes in the introduction to the volume, “[far] from being an anomalous and now faded era of activism that is disjointed from globalization and contemporary life, the minjung era was a time of vibrant political and cultural energy that enabled the flourishing of democratic culture and society on the Korean peninsula” (5).The anthology begins with a brief introductory chapter by the editor that outlines the historical trajectory of minjung thought in modern Korea. This is followed by eleven individual chapters loosely organized into five sections. Part 1, “The 1980s in Korean History and Memory,” offers metahistorical critiques of how the 1980s is remembered in Korea. Namhee Lee situates the disavowal of the 1980s minjung movement in a broader “regime of discontinuity” (17), a conservative discourse that characterizes the 1980s as a period increasingly aberrant and irrelevant to neoliberalizing South Korea. A wide array of cultural gatekeepers were responsible for such interpretation, as Lee demonstrates through a comprehensive discussion of conservative journalists, writers, and historians that also contributed to the rise of the New Right in the 2000s. Kyung Moon Hwang discusses how the politics of the present shape the legacies of the 1980s by comparing the methodological premises of the conservative and progressive accounts of the decade. While the Left tends to perceive the 1980s as “a long-term failure” in light of the neoliberal turn that ensued, the Right presents it as the triumphant outcome, not of political struggles against dictatorship but of successful economic development under strong (read: authoritarian) leadership. Hwang argues that, in spite of such contrasting views, a teleological impulse runs through both the progressives’ and the conservatives’ accounts, with the latter’s ironically couched in Marxian terms.Part 2, “Transnationalism,” explores the transnational connections of intellectual and grassroots activism in the minjung movement. Jae-Yong Kim situates the development of minjung thought in two interrelated global contexts: the postcolonial search for “alternative modernity” and its task of undoing American imperialism in the post-1945 Cold War world order, and the development of Third World literature in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and its aspirations toward nonalignment. Ruth Barraclough offers a rare glimpse into international exchange among students through a personal account of her “political travel” from Australia to South Korea in 1989. Interlaying her story with South Korean university student Lim Su-kyung’s journey to North Korea the same year, Barraclough highlights practices of “cosmopolitanism from below,” where workers, students, and activist organizations strove for transnational solidarity against the residual Cold War ideological divide. Sohl Lee examines three South Korean minjung art exhibitions in Tokyo, New York, and Pyongyang between 1986 and 1989, demonstrating how the transnational journey of the art occasioned divergent perceptions of democracy as well as of the relationship between art and politics.The stories of student and labor activism are narrated from fresh perspectives in part 3, “New Labor Culture.” Jung-Hwan Cheon investigates the understudied phenomenon of South Korean workers’ literary clubs that operated as part of night schools, company labor unions, and state-sponsored festivals. In the wake of the Great Workers’ Struggle in 1987, workers’ literary clubs formed interregional solidarity and an “alternative culture” against the 1990s return of elite-centered literature. Chang Nam Kim narrates the evolution of minjung song (minjung kayo), a protest genre that pervaded the movement scene in the 1980s, and proposes examining the genre not as an exclusive subculture but as an integral part of South Korean popular music. Discussing the musical collective Seekers of Song (Norae rŭl ch’annŭn saramdŭl), Kim highlights their dynamic musical styles and how the genre became invested with the spirit of resistance through performance in the context of activism.In part 4, “Intersectional Feminism,” feminist print culture is interwoven with representations of gender, class, and race in literature and films of the 1980s. Hye-Ryoung Lee charts the development of women’s liberation literature (yŏsŏng haebang munhak) by examining the feminist discourse that unfolded in prominent women’s literary magazines, such as Another Culture (Tto hana ŭi munhwa). These publications, Lee argues, made perceptible the interconnectedness between gender and class, as well as between state violence and domestic violence, producing in turn “composite, intersectional feminist subjectivities” (186). Kyunghee Eo engages with representations of Third World women in South Korean literature and film from the 1960s to the early 1980s by engaging with Third World literature discourse, Vietnam War and camptown narratives, and “lowbrow” erotic films. Eo contends that literary works by women writers, such as Kang Sŏk-kyŏng’s “Days and Dreams” (“Nat kwa kkum”), and erotic films, such as Kang Taesŏn’s Black Woman (Hŭngnyŏ), feature black female characters that complicate the heteropatriarchal representations of the female racial other in works of Third World literature writers.The essays in part 5, “Popular Culture,” scrutinize the commonly drawn dichotomy between minjung culture and popular culture. Discussing the boom of the “ero film” (ero yŏnghwa) in the 1980s, Yun-Jong Lee challenges the predominant understanding of the genre as a depoliticized product compliant with Chun Doo Hwan’s 3S (sex, sports, and screen) policy. In actuality, Lee argues, films of the ero genre frequently shared with minjung ideology and feminism such themes as anti-Americanism and counterdevelopmentalism. Sunyoung Park explores the mutual relationship between minjung thought and science fiction in the 1980s. Analyzing the politicohistorical allusions in Bok Geo-il’s speculative fiction In Search of an Epitaph (Pimyŏng ŭl ch’ajasŏ) and Kim Chunbŏm’s graphic novel Metal Brain 109 (Kigye chŏnsa 109), Park suggests that the popularity of these sci-fi texts facilitated the dissemination of subversive thought and ideals of democracy.In her afterword, Jin-kyung Lee offers a critical reassessment of the identitarian modalities that prevailed in state mobilization as well as in counterstate movements in post-1945 South Korea: the state, the ethnonation, and class. Discussing leftist nationalist literature, Lee contends that its exclusive linkage between class and nation often obscured other formations and expressions of dissent. Proposing a more resilient, operative notion of the political in place of identity-based politics, Lee suggests reinterpreting literary works outside the leftist nationalist canon “to recuperate other axes of formation” (282).By focusing on historiography, popular media, literary productions, and transnational experiences, Revisiting Minjung opens new avenues for the study of minjung culture under authoritarianism. Comprehensive and nuanced in its approach, the volume is an important contribution to our understanding of the rich cultural terrain that shaped and was shaped by minjung activism in the 1980s. As an editor, Park does an admirable job of striking a balance among a diverse group of emerging and established scholars (several of whom were activists themselves during the titular decade) and bringing coherence to the volume, not to mention her tremendous work as a translator to bring Korean language scholarship in dialogue with English-language scholarship. Revisiting Minjung is a delight to read, as each essay takes the reader to fascinating and even unexpected sites of social formation and cultural production of an era that continues to exert influence on South Korean culture.The resilience of minjung activism and its transnational connections so vividly demonstrated in the volume leave one only more curious about the symbolic meaning and pragmatic repurposing of the 1980s legacies in South Korea’s present. Additionally, while the connections to North Korea are discussed in Sohl Lee’s and Ruth Barraclough’s chapters, one is left desiring a chapter devoted to North Korea—given that the tenets of minjung thought at its peak were inspired by various elements of Juche (Chuch’e) ideology. These minor omissions aside, its accessibility, treatment of diverse media forms, and attention to issues of gender, race, and class will make the book rewarding for graduate as well as undergraduate audiences. Beyond the Korean studies readership, the book will also be of great interest to scholars, students, activists, and general readers interested in the cultural history of authoritarian periods. Through this volume, the minjung era finds fresh relevance at a timely juncture in the ever-thriving culture of dissent in contemporary South Korea.