Editor's Note

Abstract

Editor's Note Cheehyung Harrison Kim In the aftermath of South Korea's recent presidential election, while the public, regardless of party alignment, was still reeling from Yun Sŏkyŏl's victory, there emerged a startling voting pattern. Almost sixty percent of men under the age of thirty had voted for the far right-wing candidate. This was a group that had been important in the historic Candlelight Movement of 2016–2017, which ousted the ultra-conservative president Pak Kŭnhye and brought in the presidency of the center-right Mun Jaein, anticipating the lengthy rule of Mun's party, the Democratic Party. Five years is a long time in liberal politics, but the fact that in the period of a single presidential term the majority of South Korea's young men rejected the Democratic Party and its capable, if not slightly slick, candidate Yi Chaemyŏng and found resonance in far right-wing politics was bewildering—and symptomatic of a cultural fissure in the country. The on-going MeToo movement in South Korea is a crucial rectifying process, but it has also made more audible the discontent of underprivileged men who experience disadvantages in university admission, secure employment, and social life, largely due to the economic class and geographic region they were born into. They see—misrecognize—the new culture of feminism, with its sophisticated use of art, scholarly research, and social media, as another layer of unfairness over which they have little influence (when in reality it will uplift them, too). At the same time, we are observing that the conservative turn of young men is a global phenomenon driven by the conditions of labor precarity. And naturally, [End Page iii] all over the world, far right-wing political parties like Yun's People Power Party have seized this capitalist condition of misery and turned it into election votes by supporting the culture of anti-feminism (reminding us again that misery and crisis are central to capitalist expansion, not its byproducts). Culture is at once a medium through which we make sense of the world (for good or ill), a field of empowerment for the underprivileged, and a source of hegemony for the state and corporations. This cultural complexity is discernible in South Korea's current political landscape, and it is also the very theme explored in this volume's Special Section "Music That Moves: Sonic Narratives in Modern Korea," dexterously guest edited by Dafna Zur and Susan Hwang. In Katherine Lee's elegant piece on the World Vision Korean Orphan Choir, musical performance is at the heart of transnational religiosity and Cold War politics. Transnationalism is also the framework of Dafna Zur and Yoon Joo Hwang's original research on children's music during the colonial period, when the merger between western style of songwriting and Korean emotionality unevenly transpired in the genre of tongyo. Music as a field of popular resistance is the core of Pil Ho Kim's audacious piece on South Korea's 1960s protest songs, which, for Kim, is a pre-minjung expression of the multitude. Susan Hwang's emotionally prodigious article, too, is on the resistive and resilient aspect of music, which, in the aftermath of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, served as a crucial repertoire for the counter-state. From the opposite side, music as practice of hegemonic efficacy is dealt with in Alexandra Leonzini and Peter Moody's intricate article on North Korea's sonic culture, as it is done in Roald Maliangkay's perspicacious study on South Korea's use of K-pop in marketing. Whether the hegemonic entity is the state or a corporation, music is, in these two articles, a potent medium of influence. The regular pieces in the volume are just as rich and relevant. Hyang-Joo Lee's review article covers the history of presidential authority in South Korea, about which many of us will be pondering in the coming years. Such an authority is critically explored in Jungyoung Kim's research on the notion of freedom during the early Pak Chŏnghui period, in the 1960s. Conservative populism, which blossomed during the Pak years, is to be a pertinent phenomenon in South Korea today...