1. Introduction: Korean Memories and Psycho-historical Fragmentation: Fast Forward, Retrospective.-2. From War to War: Ch’anggyŏng Garden and Post-Colonial Militarism in Early (South) Korea.-3. Women’s Redress Movement for Japanese Military Sexual Slavery: Decolonizing History, Reconstituting Subjects.-4. Legacies of the Korean War: Transforming Ancestral Rituals in South Korea.-5. Experience of the Korean War and the Means of Subsistence of War Widows.-6. Memories of the Korean War among Rural Communities: The Village Called the “Moscow of Icheon”.-7. Forgetting Korean Agency in the Transnational Cold War.-8. Korea’s Vietnam War and the Fall of Saigon: Reconstructing the War Memories of Detained Diplomats.-9. 'Politics of Desire': Ruling Discourse and Mass Mobilization of the Park Chung Hee Regime.-10. Subjectivity of Civil Militia in May 18 Gwangju Uprising.-11. Memories of Labor, Identities of the Time: Workers and Intellectuals in Korea’s Labor Movement of the 1980s.-12. Truth, History Revision, and South Korea’s Mnemonic Representation of the Past.
Mikyoung Kim is an independent scholar. Her previous books include the Routledge Handbook of Memory and Reconciliation in East Asia (2015) and Northeast Asia’s Difficult Past (2010), co-edited with Barry Schwartz.
This pioneering book is the first English volume on Korean memories. In it, Mikyoung Kim introduces ‘psycho-historical fragmentation’, a concept that explains South Korea’s mnemonic rupture as a result of living under intense temporal, psychological and physical pressure. As Korean society has undergone transformation at unusual speed and intensity, so has its historical memory. Divided into three sections, on lingering colonial legacies, the residuals of the Cold War and Korean War, and Korea’s democracy movement in the 1980s, Korean Memories and Psycho-Historical Fragmentation aims to tell multi-layered, subtle and lesser-known stories of Korea’s historical past. With contributions from interdisciplinary perspectives, it reveals the fragmentation of Korean memory and the impact of silencing.