This interdisciplinary panel explores the agency of public and collective performances of mourning in modern and contemporary Korea. As seen throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, public performances of mourning have disrupted, altered, and recreated narratives of colonial and state violence in Korea. Moving beyond expressions of grief, what are the emancipatory possibilities of communal mourning, as imagined and exercised through music, literature, film, and cultures of protest? How is lament, as an artistic and political force, capable of articulating conditions of oppression and mobilizing collective action? What is the relationship between individual and collective mourning? This panel engages the Presidential theme of “Emancipatory Narratives” and is in dialogue with Herman Beavers’ assertion that “Articulating emancipatory narratives involves the assertion of agency, even when those assertions are certain to invite resistance.” The papers in this panel consider the agentic possibilities and outcomes of mourning in the Korean context.

Susan Hwang examines how mourning for the Jeju 4.3 Incident is articulated across music and literature by analyzing the song “The Southern Land That Does Not Sleep” (Cham tŭlji annŭn namdo, 1988) alongside Han Kang’s novel We Do Not Part (Chakpyŏl haji annŭnda, 2021). Written in the immediate aftermath of South Korea’s transition to procedural democracy, “The Southern Land That Does Not Sleep” performs mourning through collective singing that enables audible iterations at memorials and commemorative events. Published more than three decades later, We Do Not Part appeared at a moment when the South Korean state began formally addressing the massacre’s legacy through the 2021 revision of the Jeju 4.3 Special Act. Hwang examines how these works participate in a shared field of remembrance in which mourning is performed across media, demonstrating how performative and intertextual practices transform the singing voice, narrative form, and the Jeju landscape itself into active sites of remembrance.

Drawing on archival and ethnographic field research, Hayana Kim investigates women-led performances for democracy during South Korea’s last years of military dictatorship, foregrounding the May Mothers (owŏl ŏmŏni), bereaved mothers of the Kwangju Uprising. Kim examines the political force of a mourning practice she terms “chesa (memorial rites) activism”—a commemorative activism which the mothers organized to turn an otherwise private family ritual into a spectacular anti-dictatorship protest in Mangwŏldong Cemetery, a local graveyard for the uprising’s victims. This paper makes an affective and feminist intervention in Korean historiography, examining the contribution of women in the history of democratization and discussing the role of the body and affect in transforming politics in South Korea.

In their coauthored paper, Haerin Shin and Mingyo Sung examine feminized ritual labor and the figure of the female shaman in the film Exhuma (2024), demonstrating how the shaman reorients mourning toward a decolonial ritual practice. Shin and Sung reveal how exhumation becomes symbolic emancipation of the unmourned dead buried beneath colonial memory. The paper considers the contemporary resonances of the film and how the shaman signals an emergent demand for new subjects of mourning: feminized agents capable of unsettling the selective governance of death in historical memory by reconstituting epistemic authority over who may be grieved, by whom.

Min Ji Choi investigates the agentic potential of the “ritual poetry” (kut-si) by the poet and founding editor of Women’s Newspaper, Ko Chŏnghŭi (1948–91). Choi argues that the shamanistic format structurally modeled on the ssitkim-kut, a shamanic rite intended to console the spirits of the dead, constitutes the political core of Ko’s ritual poetry, serving as an actualizing vessel for mourning the victims of the 1980 Kwangju massacre. By tracing the overlooked influence of Minjung theology and Kim Chiha’s political poetics on Ko, the paper identifies a fundamental connection between mourning and political liberation in her poetry, where individual lament effectuates collective mobilization.

Each of the four presentations will be given 14-15 minutes (60 minutes total), which will leave at least 15 minutes of unstructured discussion. The selection of panelists incorporates a diversity of voices both in terms of stages of careers and geographical location of participants’ institutions. The panel includes two assistant professors, one PhD student, one associate professor, and one independent scholar. This is an international panel, with two participants traveling from South Korea (Haerin Shin and Mingyo Sung), one from the west coast (Susan Hwang, UC Santa Barbara), one from the midwest (Hayana Kim, Ohio State University), and the organizer and chair from the east coast (Ivanna Yi, Cornell University).