A Fractured Liberation: Korea under US occupation
Harvard University Press, US$29.95 hb, 304 pp
ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.
Roads not taken
In the late hours of 3 December 2024 South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in response to what he claimed was a ‘legislative dictatorship’ directed by ‘anti-state forces’. In shocking scenes broadcast around the world, citizens took to the streets in protest and mobilised army units defied orders to suppress dissent. Meanwhile, 190 legislators from both parties forced their way into the National Assembly to unanimously vote down the martial law declaration. It was rescinded just hours later, and the disgraced president was subsequently impeached and unceremoniously removed from office.
While the bewildering flurry of events illustrated, on the one hand, the durability of democracy in the Republic of Korea (ROK), they also invoked the legacies of the ROK’s formative years and the ghosts of American occupation. Yoon’s attempted coup bears the hallmarks of an ‘imperial presidency’, a term used by Jörg Michael Dostal in 2023, complete with a heavy reliance on force and the familiar scapegoating of the ‘northern threat’ to justify such force. Kornel Chang’s monograph A Fractured Liberation: Korea under US occupation is thus a welcome addition to the growing field of research on this formative period of Korean history, when the levers of power that would define decades of politics on the Korean Peninsula were first installed under reluctant and often incompetent American tutelage.
Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in. If you need assistance, feel free to contact us.
A Fractured Liberation: Korea under US occupation
by Kornel Chang
Harvard University Press, US$29.95 hb, 304 pp
ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.
Leave a comment
If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.
If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.
Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.