Memory Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea

The rise of the Far Right and the decline of democratic institutions and norms have been a global phenomenon in the last few decades, and scholarly investigations on this topic have grown in volume and intellectual depth. South Korea, once known for its spectacular achievements both in capitalist development and transition from autocratic rule to vibrant democracy, has not been an exception in the global trend of authoritarian backlash and extreme politics. Memory Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea is a new addition to the scholarship on post-democracy1 and probes the processes and manifestations of the return, or rather continuation, of Cold War politics around the Korean peninsula.The starting point in Memory Construction is when the minjung (people) project—“the three-decade-long democratization movement . . . that generated one of the most profound social, academic, religious, and artistic movements the country has seen” (2)—was attacked, despised, and declared dead in less than a decade after the exuberant democratization moment of the late 1980s. Namhee Lee approaches this politics of disavowal—or the regime of discontinuity, as she names it—as Cold War authoritarian forces’ full mobilization to respond to the emancipatory and egalitarian subversive movements of the 1980s. The dismissal of and discontinuity from the minjung project has been centered on the polemics over historical narrativization and memory (re)construction in post-democratization South Korea.Lee historicizes how the onset of neoliberal restructuring and the following institutionalization of neoliberal governance and mentality in South Korea provided the political economy basis for the shift from minjung to simin (citizen) and the uncritical complacency with liberal democracy (chapter 1). In this process the cultural replaced or dampened the political, and huildam literature, literary works about recollections of the revolutionary era, flourished (chapter 2). These writings were part of the politics of remembering and forgetting, as they were filled with laments over the shattered revolutionary hope and former activists’ subjection to the reality of post-democracy. In the context of former dissident leaders rising to the presidency (Kim Dae-jung in 1998 and Roh Moo-hyun in 2003), conservative intellectuals mobilized to stage a history war by resurrecting Park Chung Hee, a former dictator who ruled South Korea for almost two decades, as the national protector and Cold War hero (chapter 3). The conservative mass media and political and literary elites, who were created and emboldened thanks to the persistent Cold War system, have been the active agents of the politics of disavowing the legitimacy of the minjung movements. These conservative intellectuals came together under the banner of the New Right and expanded their historical project of erasing and distorting colonial, Cold War, and authoritarian crimes and injustices (chapter 4).In discussing these reverse processes of discrediting and deleting the transformative democracy project of the 1980s, Lee problematizes the politics of time and temporality, a notion heavily borrowed from Jacques Rancière and Walter Benjamin. Standing against historicism, an approach that sees history as sequential cumulation of historical facts and events, Lee highlights that the politics of time brings the past and the present together by rupturing the presumed linearity of historical time and occurrences. As such, the work of remembering and forgetting is part of serious political projects that can either erase or acknowledge the sufferings and injustices of the past generation.Lee, as the author of The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea (2007), seems to have been destined to write her second book about the deconstruction of the minjung project in post-democratization Korea. It was such a sudden, unexpected, and frustrating reversal in Korean politics that begged analytical interpretations for people and scholars to process this immense collision of the past and the present.Memory Reconstruction is a welcome addition not only for those interested in Korean politics and history but also more broadly for readers interested in learning how democratization and democracy can be fragile under the persistence of the Cold War system and the blunt desires of neoliberal capitalist forces. The book further contributes to a comparative, historical understanding of the Far Right in the East Asian context. Lines in the epilogue particularly resonate with scholars concerned about conservative backlash and democratic decline; there, Lee suggests that the poetics of remembrance is resurrecting “the memories of the lived experience as a source for thinking about the limits and possibilities of a transformative political praxis” (136).

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