The Insurgency of Mourning: Sewol across the Transpacific

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the rhetoric and embodied performance of mourning by “Sewol Parents” and develops the idea of insurgent melancholia to explain their role in moving a nation and the Korean diaspora across the Pacific, including fueling the democratic movement to impeach Korea’s first female president, Park Geun Hye, in 2017. While the nature of neoliberal violence is to seek invisibility, the diasporic mourning connected to these students who drowned aboard the Sewol Ferry revived memories of Korea’s dictatorial period and fueled new progressive politics and culture spanning the U.S. and Korea, making visible the ongoing violence of U.S. militarism and capitalism across the Pacific. By engaging representations of the broken family that frames the survivors’ insurgent melancholia, I conclude by reflecting on the unruliness of watery graves.