Ebook: Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea : Crossing the Divide

Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea: Crossing the Divide explores the multi-scalar implications of divided Korea s liminality. Grounded in historical sources, ethnographic observation, oral narratives, and analyses of popular culture and the political economy of media rituals, this book s analysis centers on the pivotal period following the Inter-Korean Summit of June 2000 and focuses on a series of emotionally charged meetings among family members who had lost all contact for over fifty years on opposite sides of the Korean divide. At a time of hope and transformative change regarding the relationship between the two Koreas, these reunions occasioned the formal exchange across the inter-Korean divide of two hundred people who had been presumed dead by their families since the 1950 1953 Korean War, an unexpected resurfacing that had been without precedent on that scale. In order to investigate the Korean War s enduring impact on ordinary people s lives during a period ostensibly regarded as post-Cold War, this study considers not only the temporary crossings of a territorial boundary during the reunions; it also weighs the far-reaching impact of these reunions as symbolic crossings from death to life. The author furthermore traces how the separated-family meetings publicly underscored the connection between inter-Korean reconciliation and a domestic process of reconciliation within South Korea regarding its past history of state anticommunism under military authoritarian rule. With analysis ranging from regional geopolitics and everyday social dynamics to watershed political rituals and intimate family stories, this book offers a lens for approaching the cultural process of moving from a disposition of enmity to one of recognition and engagement amid the complex legacies of civil war and the global Cold War on the Korean Peninsula."