"March for the Beloved" and the Sonic Practices of Protest in Authoritarian South Korea

In early 1982, a group of underground activists assembled at a remote house in the city of Kwangju. Evading the watchful eye of the Chun Doo Hwan regime, the group clandestinely recorded “March for the Beloved” (Nim ŭl wihan haengjin'gok), a song to honor the “soul marriage” of deceased activists Pak Kisun and Yun Sangwǒn. Born in a city that had yet to recover from the brutal massacre of civilians staged by the military-authoritarian state in May of 1980, the song moved vastly beyond its original purpose of commemorating those massacred. Over the decades to follow, the song would emerge as the most powerful and widely sung anthem for counterstate movements in South Korea and beyond, often finding itself at the center of much controversy over how to remember the tumultuous 1980s. This talk examines the bizarre twists and turns the song has undergone since its original inception, as occasions for thinking about the culture of protest and the politics of memory that shape the legacies of democratization in South Korea.

Susan Hwang is Assistant Professor of Korean Cultural Studies at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She specializes in modern Korean literature, Korean cultural history, and translation studies. Her current research interests lie in cultural activism during social movements in modern Korea with an emphasis on the shifting relations between aesthetics and politics. She is currently working on a monograph titled, Uncaged Songs: Culture and Politics of Protest Music in South Korea. It is a cultural history of South Korea’s song movement that charts how songs became a powerful component of the struggle for democracy in South Korea during two of the nation’s darkest decades—the 1970s and the 1980s. Her latest publications are “Radicalizing Against Polarities: Poetry and Print Culture in 1980s Literary Topography” in The Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature and an article in Korean Studies, “From Victimhood to Martyrdom: ‘March for the Beloved’ and the Cultural Politics of Resistance in 1980s’ South Korea.”

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