Staging Violence, Singing Hope : Trauma, Memory, and Affect in Three Musical and Dance Performances by North Korean Migrants in South Korea

Abstract: This thesis presents new research on artistic performances of North Korean migrants living in South Korea through critical analyses of three case studies. Two of the case studies are focused on a North Korean migrant women's musical troupe, and one on a choir of North Korean and South Korean youths. Much extant research on North Korean migrants adopts the methodologies of ethnographic research, but this thesis is firmly grounded in the discipline of performance studies. Also drawing on work from trauma studies, gender studies, and cultural studies, I embrace decolonizing and de–Westernizing methodologies, and feminist principles, as central guidelines for my analyses of the performances. My original contribution to knowledge demonstrates how the artists performatively exchange and transmit historical cultural memory, and circulate collective affects related to Korean national division, through their art. The content of each case study reflects a specific aspect of the present socio–political condition of divided Korea, which I argue is haunted by three core traumas in its modern history: colonization, war, and subsequent national division. These past traumas set into motion cycles of repeated violence and suffering that persist in the socio–historical, political, and cultural circumstances in which the performances take place in the present. Asymmetrical relations of power and privilege inhere as the North Korean artists entertain South Korean audiences on the South Korean stage, in a cultural and spatiotemporal environment that produces and maintains practices of gendered epistemic violence, neoliberal capitalism, and classism. As the North Korean performers and South Korean spectators gaze at each other from unequal positionalities, collective affects are produced and exchanged in the performance space through sound, movement, and kinesthetic empathy. Generating moments of tenderness, sentiment, love, and hope for future reconciliation in their embodied representations, gestures, and voices, the artists summon "utopian performatives"; moments of collective vision and healing that imagine a better future for all. Thus, in the midst of the great cycles of dismay, violence, and trauma that haunt contemporary Korea, the performers access hope, beauty, and love in different ways in each performance.