Re-locating the national: Spatialization of the national past in Seoul

Abstract

This article is an attempt to make sense of the emerging culture of mobility in Seoul in the 1990s. The 1990s in a South Korean context is emblematic of a changed social reality and transformation. Grand narratives of development, anti-state democratization activism and Cold War politics were losing their effect and authority. Meanwhile, new forces of consumption, individualism, westernization and globalization were increasingly claiming a central presence in society and accentuating the crisis of identification and representation in cultural life and production. Looking at this particular historical situation, this article argues that the culture of mobility, in terms of the reorganization of mobility and visuality, interrupted the existing norms and mode of national identity and culture in South Korean society. The article focuses upon a new socio-cultural phenomenon known as 'Yu Hong Jun Syndrome', which emerged in the early and mid 1990s. It asks how a culture of mobility, while providing cues for ways of experiencing and seeing national landscapes and cityscapes, makes Seoulites rediscover the nation and locality as a potential space of belonging and, further, allows them to renegotiate alienated forms of social relations and everyday experiences in a globalizing metropolitan city.