This monograph examines how the division of the Korean peninsula has shaped the everyday lives of people located in the North, the South, and diasporic communities abroad. Existing scholarship tends to focus on a single historical figure or a particular archival source to make larger claims about political transformations on the peninsula.Footnote 1 Theodore Jun Yoo takes a fresh historiographical approach and recounts events on the peninsula through multiple life stories. These personal perspectives capture the complex geopolitics of each decade and “disrupt ideas of national belonging or citizenship” (p. 9). The Koreas maps out a broad geographical scope, tracing the far-reaching effects of national division from 1953 to the 2018 inter-Korea summits.
Yoo’s archive consists of cultural sources originating in the North, South, and Korean communities abroad, including fashion, film, literature, food, music, television, and visual art. These materials shed light on how state policies permeate quotidian life and delineate the nuanced affective experience of ordinary people. Personal stories highlight the ways that state policies shape the gendered divisions of labor at work and at home. This study contributes to historiographies that seek ways of understanding how the public infiltrates the private sphere and disrupts patterns of daily life.Footnote 2 Attention to diverse sources allows for a more comprehensive account of life in the North than existing studies, which are often constrained by limited access to resources.
This monograph is divided into seven chapters, each devoted to a decade beginning in the 1950s. Chapter 1 frames the “collective traumas” of colonialism, civil war, and national division through the story of painter Yi Jungseop (p. 13). Yi’s life story and visual art embody the acute anxieties that emerged around blurred ethnic, linguistic, political, and regional identities. Yi's story offers a new perspective on the psychological traumas resulting from civil war and national division.
Chapter 2 examines the 1960s as a decade when the South embarked on a path of dependent capitalist development, one where “all things America seeped into daily life” (p. 42). For the North, the 1960s were a time when self-reliance pervaded theory and practice, epitomized by the figure of Yi Seunggi, the chemist who helped create the juche fiber. Chapter 3 explores the domestic and international networks that emerged as the two Koreas continued on their respective paths in the 1970s. Music, film, and fashion reflected the effects of rapid industrialization and the Yushin Constitution's draconian policies. The North cultivated its relationships with postcolonial nations through visual media, utilized as an ideological tool, and “symbolic ideology,” installed to assert its presence in public spaces (p. 117).
Chapter 4 traverses the South's rocky road to democracy in the 1980s, beginning with author Han Kang's “shocking psychological autopsy” of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and culminating in a survey of the human costs of the 1988 Olympics (p. 123). Yoo presents the television show Finding Dispersed Families as an effort to collectively process and heal the historical trauma of separated families. This effort to heal continued into the 1990s (chapter 5), through the political venture of Kim Dae-Jung's Sunshine Policy, which proposed “joint development and prosperity” for the North and the South (p. 165). During the 1990s, both Koreas remapped their national imaginations to extend beyond the boundaries of the peninsula. In the South, this opened doors for ethnic Koreans to repatriate, and in the North, it created avenues for new types of economic relations.
Despite the divergent paths they have taken, the two Koreas remained afflicted by similar problems in the 2000s: gender inequality, human rights abuses, stigmatization of mental illness, and low birth rates. The South burgeoned into a trendsetting nation for beauty products, fashion, film, television, and music, but these products are heteronormative and cisgender, reflecting the continued marginalization of LGBTQ+ communities. The 2000s (chapters 6 and 7) engaged these cultural products as soft power, tools for negotiating the South's position in international relations. Popular culture as used in “soap opera diplomacy,” “transnational sports fandom,” and “symphonic diplomacy” (pp. 176, 178, 220). Meanwhile, the North challenged its characterization as an isolated “axis of evil” through “Arirang pageantry,” legalization of the jangmadang (ground markets), and exportation of laborers (pp. 170, 185, 183).
This work does an excellent job of distilling the immense complexities of each decade into individual histories. It does not give an exhaustive account of events such as the April 19 Movement, for example, but it suggests visual materials and texts that convey the effects of historical events on the everyday life. This is less a critique of the monograph than an appraisal of its versatility. The Koreas is appropriate for use in undergraduate and graduate courses, and it is essential reading for specialists and nonspecialists seeking creative modes of capturing the affective and gendered everyday experience of civil war and national division.
