Date:
Location:
Korea Colloquium
Namhee Lee
Professor of Modern Korean History , University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Namhee Lee is Professor of modern Korean history and Director of the Center for Korean Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her publications include The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea (Cornell University Press, 2007), The South Korean Democratization Movement: A Sourcebook (co-edited with Kim Won, Academy of Korean Studies, 2016), and Memory Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea (Duke University Press, 2022).
Chaired by Paul Y. Chang, Associate Professor of Sociology, Harvard University
Abstract:
South Korea’s transition to democracy, the end of the Cold War, and the simultaneous process of neoliberal reconstruction accompanied a paradigm shift: from minjung (people) to simin (citizen), from political to cultural, from collective to individual—a “complete break with the past.” This regime of discontinuity also discursively assigns as past or anachronistic all those phenomena that do not accommodate contemporary society’s hegemonic ideal, reconstituting people as Homo economicus. This view vindicates contemporaries concerning injustices that happened in the past and to a present that has not rendered justice for past historical injustices. Memory Construction and the Politics of Time suggests a Benjaminian view of historical temporality that sees history as not a continuous accumulation of homogeneous, empty time but a time filled with the intermingling of past and present. To make amends for the previously unacknowledged suffering of the past generation and to make efforts to continue the unconcluded struggles of the past is to open up a possibility for true emancipation of society.
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To attend this online event, please register here.
Generously supported by the Young-Chul Min Memorial Fund at the Korea Institute, Harvard University