New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. xvii, 349 pp. (Illustrations.) US$60.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-231-17192-2.
Hyun Ok Park’s The Capitalist Unconscious commences with the provocative claim that “capital has already unified Korea in a transnational form” (1). The book proceeds to urge readers to depart from widely held perceptions that the border dividing North and South Korea is one of the most politicized, regulated, and rigid in the world. Instead, Park argues that the North Korean border has become increasingly permeable since the 1990s, heralding a new era whereby the Korean Peninsula has become unified through continuous flows of transnational labour and capital. The book relies, in particular, on ethnographic data and interviews, collected between 2001 and 2007, of Korean Chinese migrants and North Korean refugees. The empirical chapters primarily focus on how the lives and migratory patterns of these diasporic Koreans across the Manchurian border regions, North Korea, and South Korea demonstrate Park’s notion of a unified, transnational Korea.
Perhaps the main contribution of the book lies in its ability to provide a meta-theory for the study of Korean nationhood since its economic rise. By demonstrating how, in the aftermath of the Cold War, conflations of democracy and capitalism have in many ways perpetuated social malaise under the guise of social justice, Park challenges the notion that Korean unification necessitates a territorial union and the reconciliation of the opposing forces of socialism and capitalism. The book grapples with how the political is entangled in the economic, and in so doing, is one of the first of its kind to bridge two of the most important pools of scholarship on contemporary Korean society: the first, including labour politics and democratization from the postwar era to the late 1980s, and the second, trends of globalization and transnationalism in Korean society since the 1990s, following Kim Daejung’s segyehwa (globalization) campaign.
Park sets the stage for us to make these theoretical connections in chapter 2, “The Aesthetics of Democratic Politics: Labor, Violence, and Repetition,” where she links the minjung (the people’s) movements sparked by Chun Taeil’s self-immolation in the Seoul Peace Markets in the 1980s, with the activism of foreign migrant workers in more recent years. The empirical chapters that follow similarly carry out this theme, as Park analyzes how the experiences of North Korean refugees and Korean Chinese labour migrants can be understood within the context of South Korea’s rocky pathway to democratization and its tragic past under successive authoritarian regimes in the postwar era.
Ultimately, the book advocates for a “recognition of the capitalist unconscious” that departs from an illusory perception of South Koreans “as victors in the Cold War struggle and jettison their gazes toward North Koreans and Korean Chinese as objects of their humanitarianism and decolonization” (288). By divulging unexpected parallels in South Korea’s history of the oppressed, from the student activists fighting against the authoritarian regime to diasporic labour migrants in the country’s more recent past, Park allows scholars of Korea to reflect on how the seemingly tangentially related literatures of democratization and globalization are actually two sides of the same coin, and how historical events, even when suppressed, exhibit strong tendencies toward repetition.
For instance, philanthropic efforts to liberate North Korean refugees through human rights advocacy, or Korean Chinese migrants through reparation politics, Park argues, can ironically reify simplistic narratives of their oppression that help perpetuate their alienation—both physically and psychologically—from Korean society. The book thus shares with other scholars in the field of contemporary Korea a perspective of neoliberalism in which we are active participants in recreating the exploitation of our labour, such that even our own desires are coopted by the system to help legitimate structures of inequality. Along these lines, vivid descriptions from her interviews of Korean Chinese workers who willingly sacrificed their bodies in the name of this so-called market utopia in chapter 4, “Socialist Reparation: Living Labor,” were especially striking.
Although the book’s empirical and theoretical breadth are impressive, the ambitious scope of the volume often felt on the one hand overwhelming and disjointed, yet also, in other ways incomprehensive, particularly in its conspicuous exclusion of any mention of the Korean diaspora in Japan, otherwise known as the zainichi population. Given its zealous theoretical claims for conceptualizing a transnational Korean nationhood through an analysis of its diasporic populations, its neglect of the zainichi, the third-largest population of overseas Koreans, lead to questions of generalizability and selection bias.
The lack of mention of the Koreans in Japan is also conspicuous in light of Park’s interest in “the democratic politics of reparations, human rights advocacy and decolonization” (288) of diasporic Koreans, given the socio-political positionality of the zainichi relative to these issues. The Koreans in Japan are third- and fourth-generation postcolonial subjects who first migrated to Japan as labour migrants during colonization; descendants of victims who died as a result of the co-ethnic violence that erupted during the Jeju Uprising in 1948; and prisoners of conscience in the 1970s and 1980s due to the South Korean CIA’s suspicions over their roles as North Korean spies. Although increasing deregulation of the redistributive state in China, and to a lesser extent North Korea, has perhaps led to perceptions that Cold War politics are an issue of the past, the lives of the zainichi continue to be shaped by the political and ideological divisions between North and South in their everyday lives. Koreans in Japan continue to suffer the repercussions of sharp institutional divisions along North and South, critically affecting their ability to collectively mobilize political resources to overcome discrimination in Japan. Ethnic Koreans who have maintained their North Korean passports, which they were designated by default after World War II, continue to lack the proper legal documentation to visit their ancestral homeland in the South.
Has Korea become unified through transnational capital? While the liberalization of laws on migration and trade have indeed led to changing geopolitical notions of Korean nationhood in recent years, questions remain as to whether this shift from ideological politics to capitalist desires is one that by and large applies to Sino-Korean relations and the diasporic migrants that traverse these regions.
Sharon J. Yoon
Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea
pp. 376-378