ERASING DIFFICULT HISTORY: THE DECOLONIZATION OF HERITAGE IN SOUTH KOREA
ERASING DIFFICULT HISTORY: THE DECOLONIZATION OF HERITAGE IN SOUTH KOREA

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores South Korean heritage practices aimed at erasing the colonial past from the national heritage landscape, in the course of a social movement to uncover the historical truth and create accurate representations of the past. I argue that in the 1990s, the state repudiated historic sites that were perceived as tainted by the colonial rule, because it believed them to materialize a distorted historical narrative. The state-led correction of this narrative aligned the heritage landscape with the rhetoric of colonial resistance and the representation of the nation-state as being perpetually characterized by independence and resistance. The Office of Cultural Properties, the governmental agency dealing with the management of national heritage, identified patrimonial sites that were allegedly tarnished by the colonial past and subverted their importance through various forms of erasure and forgetting. The paper investigates these practices, ranging from renaming sites and demoting the heritage status of monuments, to iconoclastic gestures such as celebrated demolitions of colonial architecture. The analysis of South Korea’s treatment of its colonial heritage illustrates the silencing of difficult memories in the process of decolonization, and the central place heritage occupies not only in identity formation, but also in breaking with the past in the course of decolonization

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