This edited volume fully focuses on the Gwangju Uprising, a citizen’s protest against state violence and military dictatorship in Korea in 1980. Since then, the Uprising has become one of the symbolic events, along with the Tiananmen Square protests, in the Korean and Asian democratization movements. However, the process of commemoration and mourning has not yet been resolved, and it remains a site of memory war, which this book seeks to intervene in. This multi-discipline volume brings together new scholarship from the fields of History, Political Science, Political Philosophy, Anthropology, Gender Studies, and Literature and Film Studies to expand comprehension of the Gwangju Uprising and democratization movements in Cold War Asia.

The contributors try to unearth forgotten voices excluded from official histories and to question what makes the Uprising significant and relevant in the present from philosophical, socio-cultural, political and transnational aspects. Additionally, they explore the postmemorial affects of the Uprising beyond official memory. This book actively intervenes in the mnemonic space surrounding the Gwangju Uprising, peering through the interstices to reveal the complexities and difficulties in the institutionalization of the memory of state violence, rather than simply commemorating the Gwangju Uprising as a symbol of resistance or remembering it as a traumatic event of the past. In this wide-ranging volume, readers will benefit from rare access to transnational, post-generational and marginal voices from the Uprising, expanding their understanding of the complexity of the Uprising and democratization in Cold War Asia.

Juyeon Bae is a research professor at the Critical Global Studies Institute of Sogang University. She earned her PhD in Film Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. She co-authored books such as Korean Screen Cultures: Interrogating Cinema, TV, Music and Online Games (2016, Peter Lang), 5.18 as Infinite Texts (2020, Munji Publishing), The Birth of Researchers: Knowledge Production and Writing in the ‘Post-post’ Era (2022, Dolbegae), For the Association of Free Individuals (2022, Munhwa Gwahaksa) and Digital Polis (2024, Galmuri). Her recent academic article, titled “Mnemonic politics around the Japanese Colonial Era in Post-Cold War Taiwan,” has been published in positions: asia critique. Her research interests include modernity, post-colonialism, state-violence, and gender in East Asian cinema.