Places of Violence and Memory: Affective Mediations of the Cheju Massacre and the Korean War

Harvard-Yenching Institute Lunch Talk

Co-sponsored by the Korea Institute

Seong Nae Kim, Professor of Religious Studies, Sogang University; HYI Visiting Scholar

Chair/discussant: Mary Steedly, Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University

This talk explores the way in which the legacies of the Cheju April Third (4.3, Sasam) Event and the Korean War are inter-generationally transmitted and reenacted in affective place-making practices of post-memory involving commemoration, exhumation, and reburial of the dead. It will also examine contestations over the meaning of mass death and social suffering in divergent narratives representing personal, family, and official memories of the massacres's violent events and their aftermath.