Nancy Abelmann
Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent
A South Korean Social Movement
$32.95, £22.95 paperback
9780520204188
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Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent, the story of a South Korean social movement, offers a window to a decade of tumultuous social protest in a postcolonial, divided nation. Abelmann brings a dramatic chapter of modern Korean history to life—a period in which farmers, student activists, and organizers joined to protest the corporate ownership of tenant plots never distributed in the 1949 Land Reform.
From public sites of protest to backstage meetings and negotiations, from farming villages to university campuses, Abelmann's highly original study explores this movement as a complex process always in the making. Her discussion moves fluently between past and present, local and national, elites and dominated, and urban and rural. Touching on major historical issues, this ethnography of dissent explores contemporary popular nationalism and historical consciousness.
From public sites of protest to backstage meetings and negotiations, from farming villages to university campuses, Abelmann's highly original study explores this movement as a complex process always in the making. Her discussion moves fluently between past and present, local and national, elites and dominated, and urban and rural. Touching on major historical issues, this ethnography of dissent explores contemporary popular nationalism and historical consciousness.
"Within a postmodern framework Abelmann considers the discursive and dialogic context of the South Korean Koch-ang Tenant Farmers Movement between 1980 and 1987. . . . Instead of viewing the movement in isolation from the processes in the larger society, Abelmann explores how discursive and dialogic 'processes' constitute the 'new social spaces' such movements occupy within a total society. The ethnography is experimental in style and structure. Through several chapters Abelmann explores the climax of the movement first and works backward, recursively, to its village origins. She concludes this useful work with an analysis of the movement."—Choice
"This book is almost alone in the literature on Korea for the sweep and sensitivity with which Abelmann situates peasants in the terrain of contested history—which I would describe as what the peasants know in their bones, versus what the state and the landlords wish them to believe."—Bruce Cumings, Northwestern University
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