Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea is a welcome addition to the fields of Korean studies and post–Cold War studies, especially in the anglophone academia, where scholarly works on separated families from the Korean War (1950–53) are scarce. Nan Kim's book investigates the Korean War's lasting impact on the intimate space of family through a contextual analysis of the war, of the June inter-Korean summit of 2000, and of the North-South separated family reunions of August 2000.
The book's introduction lays out Kim's two main theoretical frameworks to analyze and illustrate the public representation and private lives of the separated families: memory and liminality. The first section of the book, “Unsettling the Past,” examines Korea's geopolitical liminality concerning the Korean War and its aftermath. The second section, “Centering the Margin,” highlights the complex affective modes that have shaped the lives of separated families, many of whom experienced social ostracization and discrimination due to their status. In this section, Kim closely follows the family reunions of August 2000 and critically examines media representations of the reunion scenes and emotional displays during the event. The last section, “Crossing Over,” focuses on the lives of the separated family members, with particular heed to ethics and moral dilemmas. She concludes the book by briefly presenting the obstacles faced by the separated families since the landmark reunions in 2000.
Kim defines liminality as “the state of between-ness or that of being on a threshold in space or in time” (p. 21). Investigating liminality at the state level, she analyzes geopolitics and the inter-Korea relationship over the past five decades and delineates the liminality of the Korean peninsula as neither in peace nor at war. She juxtaposes this state-level liminality with that of the individual subject by highlighting the contexts and processes in which separated families have become “liminal subjects” who are caught between opposing states and thus marginalized and stigmatized in their social and cultural spheres.
Kim examines how the liminal conditions of the state and subject also rendered how specific forms of family ritual, or the ways separated families mourned their lost kin, were shaped by the traumatic memory of family separation caused by the fratricidal war. Kim argues that the North-South family reunions of 2000 initially aimed to be “political rituals intended to foster new forms of national intimacy,” but they also “yield unintended and more enduring outcomes in the ways that they unsettled notions of war death and occasioned the reframing of Korean War memory” (p. 23). Here she engages with the psychoanalytic theory of melancholia, interpreted not as a pathological status but rather as a symptom caused by the “challenge to comprehend” the context and condition of sustained mourning. The book certainly helps readers to better comprehend the psychological condition of separated families dealing with lost kin whose actual status of survival is unknown.
The strengths of the book are its detailed accounts and sophisticated analyses of the historical, political, and social contexts of the separated families and their limited, temporary, and conditional reunions of 2000 right after the historic inter-Korean summit between the South Korean president, Kim Dae Jung, and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il. However, Kim's strong consideration of historical context contrasts with the relative lack of representation of personal voices and narratives. She indirectly acknowledges this problem by explaining the difficulties she experienced in gaining access to and recruiting potential interviewees, which in turn highlights the lasting hardships—whether they be social, political, or emotional—that the separated families endured. It is apparent in the book that not only was separation a traumatic experience, but also the families’ political, social, and cultural hardships remained as trauma in progress. Nonetheless, more in-depth accounts of separated family members would have enriched Kim's book and substantiated her theoretical analysis of liminality, memory, and their connections to melancholia and performative rituals. More ethnographic treatment of the separated family members would have set her book further apart from the conventional history books on the Korean War and postwar politics.
Nevertheless, Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea makes an important contribution to the fields of Korean studies and Cold War studies at large by investigating a topic that has been much publicized but lacked critical examination. With the resumption of reunions following a series of inter-Korean summits in 2018, the families separated by the Korean War are again in the media spotlight and at the center of Korean efforts to remember their collective past. Kim's study of the 2000 family reunions provides essential insights into the present-day politics and sentiments that permeate these gatherings, including their use as political tools by both governments. This book would work well in both undergraduate and graduate courses that deal with such topics as the Korean War, postwar Korean society and family, and (post–)Cold War politics in the two Koreas.
