Cultures Of Yusin

Cultures of Yusin examines the turbulent and yet deeply formative years of Park Chung Hee’s rule in South Korea, focusing on the so-called Yusin era (1972–79). Beginning with the constitutional change that granted dictatorial powers to the president and ending with his assassination, Yusin was a period of extreme political repression coupled with widespread mobilization of the citizenry towards the statist gospel of modernization and development. While much has been written about the political and economic contours of this period, the rich complexity of its cultural production remains obscure. This edited volume brings together a wide range of scholars to explore literature, film, television, performance, music, and architecture, as well as practices of urban and financial planning, consumption, and homeownership. Examining the plural forms of culture’s relationship to state power, the authors illuminate the decade of the 1970s in South Korea and offer an essential framework for understanding contemporary Korean society.

Spirit Power explores the manifestation of the American Century in Korean history with a focus on religious culture. It looks back on the encounter with American missionary power from the late nineteenth century, and the long political struggles against the country’s indigenous popular religious heritage during the colonial and postcolonial eras. The book brings an anthropology of religion into the field of Cold War history. In particular, it investigates how Korea’s shamanism has assimilated symbolic properties of American power into its realm of ritual efficacy in the form of the spirit of General Douglas MacArthur. The book considers this process in dialog with the work of Yim Suk-jay, a prominent Korean anthropologist who saw that a radically cosmopolitan and democratic world vision is embedded in Korea’s enduring shamanism tradition.

"Korean filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors reshaped cinema in radically empowering ways amid political turbulence from liberation through the decades of military rule (1945-1987). With acts ranging from making films that brought the dispossessed to the screen to bootlegging as an effort to redistribute resources under the state's control, they explored ideas and practices that expanded the definition of democracy and pushed the limits of the cinematic medium. Drawing on archival research, film analysis, and interviews, Hieyoon Kim shows how their work foregrounds a utopian vision of democracy in which the ruled could represent themselves and exercise their rights to access resources free from state suppression. As the first account of the history of film activism in post-1945 South Korea, Celluloid Democracy shows how Korean film workers during the Cold War reclaimed cinema as an ecology in which democratic discourses and practices could flourish"--

In 1916, a group of Korean farmers and their children gathered to watch a film depicting the enthronement of the Japanese emperor. For this screening, a unit of the colonial government’s news agency brought a projector and generator by train to their remote rural town. Before the formation of commercial moviegoing culture for colonial audiences in rural Korean towns, many films were sent to such towns and villages as propaganda. The colonial authorities, as well as later South Korean postcolonial state authorities, saw film as the most effective medium for disseminating their political messages. In Cine-Mobility, Han Sang Kim argues that the force of propaganda films in Korea was derived primarily not from their messages but from the new mobility of the viewing position. From the first film shot in Korea in 1901 through early internet screen cultures in late 1990s South Korea, Cine-Mobility explores the association between cinematic media and transportation mobility, not only in diverse and discrete forms such as railroads, motorways, automobiles, automation, and digital technologies, but also in connection with the newly established rules and restrictions and the new culture of mobility, including changes in gender dynamics, that accompanied it.

This book assesses the emergence and transformation of global protest movements during the Vietnam War era. It explores the relationship between protest focused on the war and other emancipatory and revolutionary struggles, moving beyond existing scholarship to examine the myriad interlinked protest issues and mobilisations around the globe during the Indochina Wars. Bringing together scholars working from a range of geographical, historiographical and methodological perspectives, the volume offers a new framework for understanding the history of wartime protest. The chapters are organised around the social movements from the three main geopolitical regions of the world during the 1960s and early 1970s: the core capitalist countries of the so-called first world, the socialist bloc and the Global South. The final section of the book then focuses on international organisations that explicitly sought to bridge and unite solidarity and protest around the world. In an era of persistent military conflict, the book provides timely contributions to the question of what war does to protest movements and what protest movements do to war.

Foremost scholars of 1980s Korea revisit the current perspectives on this pivotal period, expanding the horizons of Korean cultural studies by reassessing old conventions and adding new narratives

A lucid narration of post-financial crisis urbanism in Seoul and the vivid experiences of living through the city in transition

The decades-long fear of South Korean national destruction has routinized national security and the sense of threat. In present day South Korea, national security includes not only war and the military, but national unity, public health, and the family. As a result, queer Koreans have become a target as their bodies are thought to harbor deadly viruses and are thus seen as carriers of diseases. The prevailing narrative already sees being queer as a threat to traditional family and marriage. By claiming that queer Koreans disrupt military readiness and unit cohesion, that threat is extended to the entire population. Queer Koreans are enveloped by the banality of security, treated as threats, while also being overlooked as part of the nation. What does it mean to be perceived as a national threat simply based on who you would like to sleep with? In their desire to be seen as citizens who support the safety and security of the nation, queer Koreans placate a patriarchal and national authority that is responsible for their continued marginalization. At the same time, they are also creating spaces to protect themselves from the security measures and technologies directed against them. Taking readers from police stations and the galleries of the Constitutional Court to queer activist offices and pride festivals, Banal Security explores how queer Koreans participate in their own securitization, demonstrates how security weaves through daily life in ways that oppress queer Koreans, and highlights the work of queer activists to address that oppression. In doing so, queer Koreans challenge not only the contours of national security in South Korea, but global entanglements of security.