publications

2023

1. Silencing the sound of cracking bones: Victim identification as memorial practice in Jeju 4.3

   Youngkwan Ban

   The Korean Journal of History of Science, 2023

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2. 75 years of silence: The continuing need for acknowledgment, accountability, and reconciliation between the United States and the Korean people

   Stephan Sonnenberg, Youjoung Kim, David Miller, and 3 more authors

   SSRN Electronic Journal, 2023

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   Our report emphasizes the centrality of the United States’ involvement in many of the atrocities that occurred in Korea during the 20th century. We highlight the role and the opportunity for the United Nations to supporting long-neglected efforts to promote truth-telling, justice, reparations and secure guarantees of non- recurrence in Korea.There is abundant evidence of grievous wrongdoing by the United States and its agents on the Korean Peninsula. As a result of South Korea’s democratization and liberalization since the late 1980s, victims and their surviving families in recent decades have become more emboldened to share their experiences with historians and human rights activists. Documents and evidence gathered from communities around Korea reveal a massive campaign by the U.S. military and their South Korean allies, beginning in 1945 and lasting well into the 1980s, to hunt and kill guerrillas and communist sympathizers across South Korea, often causing wanton casualties among civilian populations. Civilians were frequently the intended targets of such operations. Many instances of the violence targeting civilians were committed either directly by U.S. government agents or carried out by South Korean officials with the full endorsement and operational and financial support of the U.S. authorities. These acts were unconscionable, and caused immeasurable suffering for countless Korean families and communities.This report explores the perspectives of victims and their surviving family members,who continue to live with the consequences of this violence. The report highlights what these families believe must be done today, decades after the original atrocities took place, to see that justice finally be done for these communities. Many of the victims with whom we spoke were focusing their energies on ensuring that such heinous acts never happen again, not only in Korea but anywhere in the world. Regrettably, the United States has not appropriately responded to the repeated calls by victimized communities, civil society activists, academics, and historians to accept its ethical, legal, and financial obligations towards the individuals and communities devastated by its unlawful actions.As a nation and a staunch ally to the Korean people, it is paramount for the U.S. to address its past wrongdoings and take long- overdue steps toward accountability, remediation, and reconciliation.

2020

1. Echoing Ghosts

   Youngkwan Ban and Jungwoo Lee

   Qualitative inquiry (QI), 2020

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   This article is an autoethnodrama that explores the reminiscences by two authors’ immigration experiences as an international student and the dependent spouse. The story we will tell evokes how immigrant students’ adjustment requires an endless border-crossing that exists in geographical, cultural, and everyday-life levels. Indeed, while some agonies of international students were documented, the struggle of their family members, which would undergo even more troubling experience, has been less known to both public as well as academia. Moreover, by choosing the ethnodrama, the play seeks the possibility of empathetic engagement from the audience. With the dialogues based on spoken as well as unspoken performance, this script attempts to visualize the affective presence of the unseen, particularly the unfocalized immigration story of F-2, the spouse visa of international students, who calling themselves as “ghosts.”

2019

1. Talking to the Small Tableau: Touring the Site of Mediatized Memory and Forgiveness in Bongha

   Youngkwan Ban

   Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies (CSCM), 2019

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   In this article, I observe the way Bongha, a small town of South Korea, constructs the tourist experience, using continually maintained silence regarding certain aspects of the past. The town became famous after the former president Moo-hyun Roh committed a politically controversial suicide in 2009. Then Bongha serves as memory-dispositif, putting forward memory aids for Roh that are chosen to highlight his life selectively. Visitors participate in this covert silence by coordinating their behavior into unscripted, but noticeable norms. Touring Bongha brings one into an encounter with mediated memory, and the mourners atone and engage in a pilgrimage to this remote site, full of pregiven memories of Roh, which caused them a sense of indebtedness.