Public Sphere Activities Research Articles

Democracy in Myth: The Politics of Precariatization in South Korea

After undergoing a series of mass demonstrations during the past three decades, including the 2016–2017 candlelight protests that led to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye, many commentators in South Korea are confident that their country has become a land for what Karl Marx called “free men.” Korean citizens are portrayed as being ready to participate in voluntary political associations and collective actions and to pursue their interests in the public sphere. However, the data are showing the opposite to be true: citizen participation in public-sphere activities has substantially decreased since the mid-2000s, while the government has managed to improve or at least maintain its political responsiveness during the same period. Explaining the unnoticed background to this imbalance, this essay sheds light on the myth of the benefactor state in Korean democracy, arguing that this has emerged because neoliberalism has not only placed an increasing number of people in precarious positions but also neutralized them politically. The Korean government has capitalized on this situation to mythicize itself as a benefactor state that possesses an incomparable administrative capacity to take care of precarious people. By investigating the period of Park’s presidency (2013–2017) and the current rule of President Moon Jae-in (2017–), this essay shows how the myth of the benefactor state has emerged and created a unique cycle of Korean democracy.

Associational culture and civic engagement in colonial Lucknow

Despite their importance in forging notions of civility, civic engagement and political participation, nineteenth century voluntary associations have received little attention in the growing body of literature on the rise and nature of civil society in India. This article explores the mutually constitutive relationship between voluntary association and middle-class formation through the example of the Jalsah-e Tahzib (est. 1868), the first voluntary society in colonial Lucknow. A cross-communal alliance of Hindus and Muslims, representing the city’s traditional service elites and new professional classes, the Jalsah provided a secular forum of discourse and action to an emerging middle class in search of self-determination and empowerment. In investigating the association’s public-sphere activities, its role as a self-styled intermediary between the colonial state and its Indian subjects and its transformation from a literary-cultural society into a politically vocal body, I argue that voluntary association afforded a space for cultural self-assertion and critical participation eminently suited to the aspirations of the new hybrid middle class. In highlighting the vernacular character of Indian associational culture, the article seeks to demonstrate how a more rigorous engagement with the vernacular archive will provide a better understanding of the social and intellectual networks that created the fabric of Indian civic life.

Rethinking Dance History: A Reader, ed. Alexandra Carter

metaphoric potential, but of the amount of ink consumed. Paragraphs, pages and, in a few cases, entire chapters are devoted to dancers’ life stories, careers, identities, connections, and colleagues, the schools or companies they founded, the venues at which they performed, their audiences and environments: in other words, the book charts who is dancing, when, where, and for whom. Chapter 11, by Larraine Nicholas, is a case in point. Although titled “British Modern Dance in the 1940s and 1950s,” the chapter tends to concentrate instead on the careers, geographical movements, performance ventures, and pedagogic activities of its chosen historical subjects (the three emigre dancers Kurt Jooss, Sigurd Leeder, and Rudolf von Laban). Chapter 9, “Katherine Dunham’s Floating Island of Negritude,” is structured similarly, though here with the performer-focus acknowledged in author Ramsay Burt’s title. Burt offers an account of Dunham’s dance training, career, and dance aesthetics, as well as noting the ideological and social contexts within which she worked. The most intriguing of the dancer studies, though, goes beyond the normative prescription. While centered upon the careers of three historical subjects, chapter 8, by Linda J. Tomko, is not entirely biographical. As her title implies, Tomko considers a professional interaction: between “Practitioners and Patrons of New Dance in Progressive-era America.” The argument has at its basis the issue of gender: in particular, the women’s rights movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recounting U.S. separate spheres ideology, Tomko outlines how the dancers in question—the trio of Fuller, St. Denis, and Duncan mentioned earlier—engaged with female, reform-oriented audiences. Women’s study groups, culture clubs, and societies, she maintains, comprised a core component of the patronage network that supported the dancers, both financially and socially. As well as noting these backstage dealings, though, Tomko considers a more subliminal aspect to the professional engagement. She writes: “In the early twentiethcentury United States, a cluster of women movement practitioners took the opportunity to press for and to fashion dance practices that contested and confirmed current cultural issues” (p. 82). According to Tomko, then, the dancers engaged in topical debate through gestural expression. Dance itself was a vehicle of sociopolitical comment, a medium through which Fuller, St. Denis, and Duncan might reflect on women’s public-sphere activity. This is a seductive hypothesis, appealing not only to those notions, mentioned earlier, of dance as a socially embodied practice, but to broader critical currents— to feminism, feminist theory, and other “identitarian” themes that seem to encourage a dialogic, interdisciplinary critique. What is more, Tomko’s envisaging of dancers as participants in the cultural scene—as “creators and arbiters possessing cultural authority” (p. 90)—lines up neatly with present interdisciplinary tastes for the “performative”: in the present context, for the notion of dancers as owners, constructors, and communicators (rather than passive recipients) of cultural KBI22(1).book Page 160 Thursday, February 8, 2007 9:40 AM