Minjung and Its Afterlives - (East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture) (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

What happens to the people left behind by a revolution? In South Korea, the minjung movement mobilized workers, students, and intellectuals against military dictatorship--but it also produced its own exclusions. Women factory workers, deaf communities, vagrants, female opera performers: their voices were written out of the grand narrative. Yet they did not disappear. Minjung and Its Afterlives traces how these excluded subjects have reclaimed and rewritten cultural narratives from the margins, revealing minjung not as a finished past but as a force that keeps renewing itself in unexpected forms.

About the Author

Jong-hoon Kim, Ph.D., is a Professor of Korean Language and Literature at Korea University. A literary critic and poet, his research explores the expansion of the poetical. His major publications include The Return of Poetic Things (2022) and Reading Poetry Carefully (2016).

Eunjin Kang, Ph.D., is a Research Professor at the Research Institute of Korean Studies, Korea University. Her research focuses on modern poetry and literature discourse, including her poetry collection Sweetness Intoxication (2020). She is also an NRF Academic Research Professor.