Let me be dust”
Memory beyond testimony in Gwangju, South Korea
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12905421 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Melissa Karp (0000-0002-0831-4405, Duke University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 546-560 |
| Publication date | 2023-05-26 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Memory Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1750-6980 • E-ISSN: 1750-6999 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/17506980231162329 |
| OpenAlex | W4378377563 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 25 |
Archives of the 5·18 Gwangju People’s Uprising—a 1980 pro-democracy protest in South Korea—entered UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2011. UNESCO’s inclusion provided international recognition for the Uprising after censorship under the Chun Doo-hwan regime; however, the narrative clarity presented through photographs, documents, and testimony in the museum now defines and limits memorialization. By contrast, Ch’oe Yun’s 1988 novella There a Petal Silently Falls imagines what lies beyond archives. With its silent protagonist and fragmented, sometimes illegible prose, Petal interrogates the coherence of memory when stripped of testimony. Reading Petal and the Archives as distinct memory sites, this article questions how memory projects privilege evidentiary archives, which might perpetuate the very patterns of violence such projects seek to uncover. As human rights ideologies become increasingly predominant, Ch’oe’s novella reasserts not only that the agony of memory can exceed the intelligibility of the archive, but that it must
Art · Censorship · Collective memory · Ideology · Literature · Media studies · Memorialization · Narrative · Novella · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Victory · Anthropological Studies and Insights · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
There a Petal Silently Falls
The Implicated Subject
Exhibiting Atrocity
The Cultural Politics of Emotion
The Ethics of Storytelling
A century of revolution
The Past Can't Heal Us
What Is a World
South Korea since 1980
Unclaimed Experience
Silence as Possibility in Postwar Everyday Life
South Korea’s collective memory of past human rights abuses
Non-subsumptive memory and narrative empathy
The commemoration of the Gwangju Uprising
Asia’s Unknown Uprisings Volume 1
The Institutionalization of Human Rights and its Discontents
Writing history, writing trauma
Between Memory and History
Toward an Ethnography of Silence
Human Rights in a Globalizing World
| Citations per year | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |