Standing between intransient history and transient memories: The statue of MacArthur in South Korea

Abstract

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.

Memorials’ politics: Exploring the material rhetoric of the Statue of Peace

“…Ironically, the "paradox of materiality" (Blair, 1999: 37) seems to give rise to these iconoclastic counteractions: as the Statue of Peace is built to last-eventually the "comfort women" will be gone, while their memorial will remain in place-its very durability-the bronze material that it is made of-renders the statue more vulnerable; the very reason why it prompts embodied means of continuous guardianship (see also, Choi, 2014).…”

“…The paper demonstrates how material critiques of place travel across the familiar spaces of Memory Studies. It also furthers the debates in the journal Memory Studies on Korean memory, with scholars having explored local experiences of victimhood partly stemming from Japan's colonial occupation while, perhaps surprisingly, leaving out an examination of the repercussions of past sexualized violence (see Bong, 2013;Choi, 2014;Kim, 2013). The text proceeds as follows: The next section outlines what makes the Statue of Peace worthy of study for Memory Studies scholars.…”