Making minjung subjectivity: Crisis of subjectivity and rewriting history, 1960--1988

The South Korean student movement was at the forefront of the minjung (people) movement and was instrumental in South Korea's democratic transition in the late 1980s. It provided the minjung movement with theoretical articulation and physical force, and profoundly changed the landscape of social activism.;I argue that the post-colonial consciousness of South Korean intellectuals and students was marked by what I call the "crisis of historical subjectivity." The widespread perception that the post-1945 Korean history was a failure, the existence of North Korea as South Korea's the "Other," the state-imposed and deeply pervasive anticommunism, and the undemocratic education system gave rise to a distinctive sense of crisis. Korean history became a site of contestation with the state. Reinterpreting and reworking the past became central in negotiating and constructing minjung as a new political and cultural subjectivity.;Conceptualizing the student movement as a "counterpublic sphere," borrowing the Habermasian concept of public sphere, I argue that the student movement articulated and presented as public and legitimate the previously considered "unpublic" issues such as the regime's political legitimacy, questions of distributive justice, the "truth" of the Kwangju Uprising, and reunification.;I also situate the discussion of the student-labor alliance, particularly that of intellectuals' becoming factory workers, in the conceptual framework of a counterpublic sphere. With their bodily insertion into the debate on labor, students and intellectuals brought forth into the public the issues of labor. I also examine literary representation of the relations between the intellectuals and the workers in the short stories and novels written by intellectuals who turned to factories in the late 1980s.;I also consider the revival and reinvention of folk culture within the minjung movement. Madang-guk, the hard-hitting situational play, emerged from the 1970s as a social protest and as a new form of minjung drama. By the 1980s it had assumed an alternative, even utopian, form of cultural and political expression, containing within it aspirations for new forms of life and recreation and new subjectivity.