Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea Crossing the Divide

From the publisher’s website:

Drawing on reinterpretations of melancholia and collective remembrance, Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea: Crossing the Divide explores the multi-layered implications of divided Korea’s liminality, or its perceived “in-betweenness” in space and time. Offering a timely reconsideration of the pivotal period following the inter-Korean Summit of June 2000, this book focuses on a series of emotionally charged meetings among family members who had lost all contact for over fifty years on opposite sides of the Korean divide. With the scope of its analysis ranging from regional geopolitics and watershed political rituals to everyday social dynamics and intimate family narratives, this study provides a lens for approaching the cultural process of moving from a disposition of enmity to one of recognition and engagement amid the complex legacies of civil war and the global Cold War on the Korean Peninsula.

Nan Kim is associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Contents

Part I
Chapter 1: Historicizing Korea’s Geopolitical Liminality
Chapter 2: Fateful Passages, In-Between States

Part II
Chapter 3: Anti-Commemorations
Chapter 4: Threshold Rituals of Reconciliation

Part III
Chapter 5: Impossible Returns
Chapter 6: Ethical Traversals

Conclusion: Meeting with the Past
Epilogue: The Afterlife of Division