The Korean war, memory, and nostalgia

Abstract

In his article “The Korean War, Memory, and Nostalgia” Won-Chung Kim investigates how the imagination of (im)migration still governs the consciousness of the Korean people by examining Wonil Kim’s 1979 (Meditation on a Snipe) and Huijin Kang’s 2011 (The Ghost). Because of the war as many as ten million Koreans were displaced and separated from their families and they struggle with war trauma, Wong-Chung Kim’s analysis of the two texts suggests the interconnectedness of life writing and the trauma of war. Further, as the recent surge of the North Korean defectors shows, the Korean War diaspora and inter-Korean (im)migration are still an ongoing process. These (im)migrants’ life writing demonstrates that memory works in an opposite way for each group: providing a lifeline through which the war diaspora sustain life while hindering the defectors in relocating themselves to the South successfully.