"The Kwangju Uprising of 1980 and the Democratization Movement in South Korea"

In the annals of the South Korean democratization movement, the Kwangju Uprising of 1980 was the most critical event in ushering in the project of revolution in the minjung (common people) movement and defining minjung as subjects of history. The lecture will explore the process of counterremembering and rearticulating that transformed what was initially called a communist-incited riot to a “watershed event of the last hundred years” and the socio-political and cultural conditions that have given this “failed” uprising its paradigmatic potency.

Lecturer

Prof. Dr. Lee Namhee (Professor at University of California, Los Angeles, United States)

Prof. Dr. Lee Namhee is Professor of modern Korean history and Director of the Center for Korean Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her publications include The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea (Cornell University Press, 2007), The South Korean Democratization Movement: A Sourcebook (co-edited with Kim Won, Academy of Korean Studies, 2016), and Memory Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea (Duke University Press, 2022).