Download PDF by Charles R. Kim: Youth for Nation: Culture and Protest in Cold War South

This in-depth exploration of tradition, media, and protest follows South Korea’s transition from the Korean battle to the beginning of the political struggles and socioeconomic changes of the Park Chung Hee period. even if the post–Korean battle years are in most cases remembered as a time of difficulty and disarray, Charles Kim contends that in addition they created a formative and effective juncture during which South Koreans transformed pre-1945 structures of nationwide identification to fulfill the political and cultural wishes of postcolonial nation-building. He explores how country ideologues and mainstream intellectuals multiplied their efforts through raising the nation’s formative years because the middle protagonist of a newly self sufficient Korea. via designating scholars and younger women and men because the wish and exemplars of the hot countryside, the discursive degree used to be set for the awesome outburst of the April Revolution in 1960.

Kim’s interpretation of this seminal occasion underscores pupil individuals’ recasting of anticolonial resistance thoughts into South Korea’s postcolonial politics. This pivotal innovation enabled protestors to avoid the state’s respectable anticommunism and, in doing so, led to the formation of a tradition of protest that lay on the center of the country’s democracy move from the Sixties to the Nineteen Eighties. the location of ladies as subordinates within the nation-building firm can be proven to be an immediate translation of postwar and chilly warfare exigencies into the sector of tradition; this cultural conservatism went directly to form the terrain of gender family in next decades.

A meticulously researched cultural background, Youth for Nation illuminates the old importance of the postwar interval via a rigorous research of magazines, motion pictures, textbooks, archival files, and private tales. as well as students and scholars of twentieth-century Korea, the publication might be welcomed through these drawn to chilly conflict cultures, social activities, and democratization in East Asia.