Fractured massacre: Gwangju, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Han Kang

The nature of suppression and resistance is that modes of movement fracture time and power. In examining Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Han Kang’s reckoning with the Gwangju Uprising and Massacre, this article works to grapple with how resistance efforts and the state’s military response to political action ripple through time. Witnessing both Cha’s and Kang’s depictions of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and Massacre both history and the text itself represent resistance to fixed and defined (re)tellings. In many ways, literature helps to better recognize how state-sanctioned violence disorients and forever fractures our relationship to history and memory. State violence thus works to create chaos and erase any trace of it ever happening. With Cha’s Dictee and Kang’s Human Acts , the legacy of Gwangju continues to unravel and its afterlife remains unresolved.