This essay examines how the U.S. media has remembered and forgotten again the incident in which U.S. troops killed South Korean civilians who were taking refuge on the trestles of the No Gun Ri bridge in an early stage of the Korean War. Through textual analysis and oral history interviews, the research identifies narratives from both front stage (the U.S. media) and back stage (survivors’ testimonies). The study concludes that through reaffirming the official account of the Korean War—America’s mission of saving Koreans from Communist aggression—the U.S. media largely silenced South Korean survivors’ counter-narratives. As a result, the No Gun Ri story became sanitized as just another anecdotal war story that asks to be forgotten.
Since its inception in 1957, the statue of General Douglas MacArthur at Incheon City in South Korea has been a robust signifier of the American rescuing mission during the Korean War that originally was meant to evoke gratitude among the South Koreans. Yet, South Korean activists in 2005 took iconoclastic actions against the statue, calling the public's critical attention to both MacArthur's actions and to the role of the United States during the Korean War. This case study of MacArthur's statue reveals two processes at work: first, how a statue, in a time of transition, transforms itself from a mere signifier of intransigent history into a reflexive medium of transient memories of a past event and second, how a statue, in its surrounding space, can embrace the conflicting gestures that audiences from two different generational and ideological positions simultaneously perform. I conclude that a statue, reconfigured in time and space, has a strong potential to become a dissenting medium that effectively reemerges subversive memories to confront consensual notions of a past event.
In 2000, the Associated Press investigative report team won the Pulitzer Prize award for reporting on the No Gun Ri incident in which American troops during the Korean War killed innocent civilian refugees who had taken shelter near and under the bridge called No Gun Ri. As the primary witnesses of the No Gun Ri killings, female survivors have courageously communicated their unutterable trauma through both scripting and exorcizing. Through oral history interviews with survivors in South Korea, this article examines how the Confucian script of motherhood (i.e., mothers as reproducers, protectors, and expandable assistants of the male blood line) has enabled the No Gun Ri female rhetors on one hand to weave trauma into plausible stories, yet on the other hand provoked them to reflect on their memories with a sense of culpability. The findings of the study also suggest that the oral form of communication has facilitated the female rhetors to exorcize inarticulable memories which cannot be subject to the Confucian script of motherhood.
Journalists plunge into a social drama in which they interact with other actors, witness an event, and translate their observations into sensible texts to communicate with audiences who are not ‘on location’. A journalist’s account is the partial representation of the very reality that he or she constructs at the moment of witnessing an event within a specific context. A journalistic text thus does not merely create the archive, but works as the repertoire that invites us to participate in a continuous meaning-making process during subsequent memory constructions. Based on media coverage of the Korean War in 1950 by Life and Time magazines, this article identifies five plausible scenarios of how US journalists performed acts of witnessing the unknown battlefield of Korea. This exploration prods readers to critically appreciate both the journalist’s role as memory agent and the journalistic text as the repertoire in our act of remembering.
The term “Yŏsun Killings” refers to a prewar atrocity in which the US-allied South Korean forces killed numerous civilians who were accused of being either communists or communist sympathizers in the cities that had been occupied by rebels in the southwestern part of South Korea. As one of the sites of these atrocities, Gurye became the first town in South Korea to erect a public memorial in 2006 for the victims of the Yŏsun Killings. Gurye presents a case that demonstrates how democratized South Korea has continued to negotiate a strong legacy of anticommunism, even at its subversive memorial sites. In a land that has long muted the memories of an old atrocity, suppressed mourners in Gurye are still struggling to reclaim their fundamental yet long-deprived rights to mourn the loss of their loved ones.
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