Merose Hwang, Ph.D.

Post-atrocity survivors construct spaces of being through various levels of visibility and stages of construction. Those with inherited memories of their ancestors from mass atrocities share the ability to exert their postmemories that mediates the past memory in its affective force to restore their sociability with their relatives, neighbors, community, and nation. A central medium of postmemory typically comes in the form of commemorative ritual practices that contain a mixture of mourning and re-creation of family and community. Ritual engages informal sociocultural processes outside the purview of the state. Commemoration rituals reflect ordinary people’s attempts to seek moral renewal and social repair to promote social reconstruction and recovery of humanity. This essay considers feminist interventions of intimate memorial scales, enabling us to envision potential alternative historical trajectories in post-massacre commemorations, memorials, reburials, and as mnemonic locations for agonistic testimonies to emerge around a mid-century massacre in South Korea called the “Cheju April 3 Incident.” We take into consideration how the postmemory of the Cheju April 3 Incident is intergenerationally transmitted and ritually re-enacted through family ancestor worship, and the reburial of remains after the exhumation of mass graves. The lessons of postmemory practices are crucial to the foundation of humanity after atrocity.

The Korean Peninsula has been suspended in an ongoing Cold War since Second World War. Within South Korea, people are starting to come out about their experiences of mass trauma stemming from the Cold War. This chapter focuses on indigenous spiritual rituals as spaces where such traumas are shared to “deideolize” the myth of American protection (Rivera, Concepts of liberation psychology. In: Comas-Diaz L, Rivera ET (eds) Liberation psychology: theory, method, practice, and social justice. American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000198-000, 2020, p. 46). Micro-level, sacred ceremonies have a coalescing nature to transform traumatized and estranged people to form new social subjectivities and work towards needed change. This chapter will consider ceremonies that address a massacre known as the “April Third Incident” and the effects that ritual participation has on demilitarization movements in South Korea and beyond. To honor these subaltern experiences, I recognize “April Third” ceremonies as indigenous technologies that mobilize the oppressed to self-advocate and help traumatized communities find their healing journey back to their ancestral homes. This chapter may also cause settlers outside of Korea to reflect on how our historical dislocations helps to prolong the Cold War and disconnect related struggles with people of color in the diaspora.

A long-standing threat of war on the Korean Peninsula has retarded recognition and reconciliation of military-related atrocities committed in the establishment of this divided territory. Meanwhile, surviving generations utter their grief over the internecine and foreign killing of their ancestors in grassroots memorials and ceremonies. When restless ghosts of mass-murdered individuals appear in shamanic ritual spaces, they summon subversive networks around capsulated moments of the most unrestrained violence and shake onlookers out of their Cold War vigilance. They enact their whispered family traumas to push against nationalist narratives and to provoke a shared experience of injustice while often overlooking consensus on political mobilization. This chapter will consider one such ritual specter: there is a community ritual for the spirits of “comfort women”; a case that may be seen as a form of femicide of sexually enslaved women by the Japanese imperial army. Taking a close look at these atrocity rituals does three things: they highlight the presence of colonial forces in a Cold War-bifurcated region. Secondly, by seeing them as a shamanic liberatory practice, these rituals can demonstrate a type of epistemological disobedience to modern, militarized states. Thirdly, their predominance of female ritualists, clients, patrons, and onlookers speaks to the demand to involve non-patriarchal communities in intergenerational healing, decolonial states of being, and Indigenous cultural resilience.