About this item
Highlights
- Across the world, protest has become a much-debated tactic in struggles against inequality, political corruption, and ecological disaster.
- About the Author: Jennifer Jihye Chun is a sociologist and Professor of Asian American Studies and Labor Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
- 322 Pages
- Social Science, Ethnic Studies
Description
Book Synopsis
Across the world, protest has become a much-debated tactic in struggles against inequality, political corruption, and ecological disaster. In South Korea, protest is a ubiquitous and essential form of political expression. In 1987, mass protests forced reforms that led to democratizing government. In 2017, the Candlelight movement removed the sitting president. Beyond these spectacular national protests, Korean workers and minority groups regularly turn to protest to express their grievances and assert their rights.
Based on long-term ethnographic research with labor and social movement activists, Against Abandonment is at once a chronicle of the life-and-death character of protesting precarity in South Korea and a searing examination of repertoires of solidarity for upending injustice. Protest forms such as long-term encampments, life-threatening hunger strikes, and perilous high-altitude occupations are agonizing to perform and to witness but often powerful as catalysts for change. Chun and Han situate South Korean protest in transnational context to demonstrate how the struggles of South Korean workers are inextricably tied to the globalized conditions of neoliberal capitalism. Building on the work of abolitionist feminist thinkers, the book theorizes protest as a political form with far-reaching resonance across history and geography, and underscores the significance of collective survival, self-determination, and emancipatory transformation.
Review Quotes
"This book is a brilliant and breathtaking study of protests in South Korea since the 2000s. Based on inspiring ethnographic research in South Korea, Chun and Han investigate how precarious workers in diverse sectors resist their social death through iconic extralegal actions. Against Abandonment is a rare study that puts theory and history in productive dialectics. Written by two leading figures in Korean studies, the book is a model of fruitful collaboration that melds sociological and interdisciplinary studies of protest, gender, and affect. It is a rich, comprehensive account of South Korean protests--their unknown histories, contexts, and unexpected twists and turns." --Hyun Ok Park, author of The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea
"This extraordinary book looks to the seemingly strange world of extreme protest and offers vital insight into contemporary political life. Han and Chun's analysis is as generative as it is probing, showing how through spectacular acts of refusal, people without economic or existential security create infrastructures to transform their worlds." --Deborah Cowen, University of Toronto
About the Author
Jennifer Jihye Chun is a sociologist and Professor of Asian American Studies and Labor Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Ju Hui Judy Han is a geographer and Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.