Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. xii, 330 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$59.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-7205-2.
Ross King’s Memory, Reinvention, and the Korean Wave deals primarily with the relationship between memory and the built environments of Seoul. In particular, it takes Pierre Nora’s distinction between lieux de memoire and milieux de memoire to analyze the urban fabrics and architectural heritage of Seoul. The book is roughly chronologically ordered, starting with the period before colonization. It then moves on to the period of colonization by the Japanese, and then to the developmental regime of the military dictatorship. It ends with the current digital culture of Seoul and the Korean Wave.
In his introduction, King outlines the main themes explored in the volume, including memory, identity, and modernity. Contested historiography, especially regarding colonization and modernity, is addressed, along with a discussion of the relevant literature dealing with modern Korean historiography. King also introduces scholarly debates surrounding colonial modernity, including “sprouts theory” and “colonial modernity theory,” with rebuttals/revisions associated with both theories. Chapter 2 traces the urban history of Seoul from the period before liberation in 1945, with a discussion of political ideologies and events that influenced urban developments. King discusses the Donghak movement and the March First Movement, as well as the Japanese colonial regime’s attempts at assimilation and mobilization. King then moves on to colonial architecture, such as the Japanese Bank of Chosun Building and Seoul Station as the political projects of the time. Chapter 3 follows Seoul’s changes during Park Chung-hee’s military regime and how that regime utilized tradition and reimagined the past by reconstructing important monuments, such as Gyeongbok Palace. Kim Swoo Geun’s role as the first-generation Korean architect in shaping post-Korean War architectural discourse about Korean identity is also analyzed. Chapter 4 deals with the question of what kind of city Seoul is and where it is headed. King approaches this inquiry by treating the city as a collage and fragments of memory. Contemporary urban environments in and around Seoul, including Dongdaemun, Itaewon, Songdo, and Paju Book City are discussed. Chapter 5 addresses new culture, such as the Korean Wave and the generation of nostalgia for tradition. This chapter turns to film, mass media, TV dramas, and K-pop to analyze the hyperspaces conditioned by a long break, or the suppression of radical forms of cultural representation. Chapter 6, offering a conclusion, speculates on the changes in Seoul’s urban spaces. King asks whether Seoul’s “urban space [is] able to address the ironic or anti-nostalgic view of its own history” (257), but concludes by noting that the answer is negative, although there are some positive signs of change.
King’s book is comprehensive, dealing not only with built environments but also film, novels, and artists/architects that occupy important cultural positions in South Korea. For instance, he studies the works of early modern novelists such as Chae Man-Sik and Pak Tae-won in order to understand the construction of colonial urban space. The discussion of film director Shin Sang-ok and video artist Paik Nam June forms an important basis from which to understand the historical context of the current Korean Wave. King also analyzes political movements such as Donghak and the minjung movement to illustrate indigenous activism and the role of Christianity in embracing progressive elements in historical activism and adapting to local context. One of the strengths of this book is the broadness of its scope and the introduction it offers to the long history of modern Korea without losing its academic focus on the question of memory and urban space.
Another strength of King’s book is that it provides a spatial analysis of Korean modern history, to include contemporary urban and cultural developments. Other texts that deal with the spatial dimension of Korean history primarily address the colonial period (1910–1945) and early developmental state of the 1960s and 1970s. Todd Henry’s Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (University of California Press, 2014), and Hong Kal’s Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism: Spectacles, Politics and History (Duke University Press, 2013) focus on colonial spaces. Texts that discuss the Korean Wave, such as The Korean Wave: Evolution, Fandom, and Transnationality (Tae-Jin Yoon and Dal Yong Jin, Lexington Books, 2017) or Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media (Sangjoon Lee, University of Michigan Press, 2015) fail to address urban history and the relationship between cultural representations and spatial reality.
King critically reflects on the relationship between urban developments and cultural fragmentation by noting that the proliferation of bang (room-like spaces, noraebang, PC bang, etc.) represents the retreat of everyday life into fragmented interiorized spaces. Another important point he raises is the issue of a new vernacular, or backstreet “boxlands” that represents ordinary urban fabrics of Seoul, and rightly observes that these deserve more academic attention. King’s work is very insightful since it effectively shows the historical processes behind contemporary manifestations of Korean culture.
Despite its many strengths, the book’s discussions of various districts of Seoul could have delved deeper. For instance, discussion of Insadong and its promotion as “traditional street” and its subsequent gentrification could have included a discussion of the NGO movement to increase pedestian streets, and how this relatively new urban issue confounds the urban discourse regarding the preservation of urban identity. Similarly, the discussion of the development of Itaewon, with its sizable immigrant community, as a cosmopolitan entertainment district could have been supplemented by examining its symbolic position as an alternative or counter-culture during the military dictatorship of Park Jung-hee. While American-style bars or nightclubs in Itaewon represented the uneven power relation between the US and Korea, they also represented a form of cultural resistance to both the censored South Korean media and the militaristic state regime.
Overall, this book is well written, with broad discussions of South Korea’s urban changes and how they reflect the ways in which memories are both constructed and erased. Readers interested in the historical dimension of current Korean culture should be most appreciative of this work.
Jieheerah Yun
Hongik University, Seoul, South Korea