The Politics of Time and Remembrance as Emancipatory

November 16, 3:00pm - 5:00pm
Mānoa Campus, Center for Korean Studies Auditorium

The Center for Korean Studies is pleased to present the 3rd Yang's Lecture. This presentation explores the politics of time that the regime of discontinuity of post-1987 South Korea engages in and its historiographical and ethical implications. I characterize articulations or narratives that erode, distort, or silence a certain kind of memory as constituting the regime of discontinuity. The regime of discontinuity discursively assigns as past or anachronistic all those phenomena that do not accommodate contemporary society鈥檚 hegemonic ideal. This view of temporality vindicates contemporaries concerning injustices that happened in the past and to a present that has not rendered justice for past historical injustices. Informed by Walter Benjamin鈥檚 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, I suggest poetics of remembrance as an alternative. 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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Center for Korean Studies, Mānoa Campus

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