The six articles that make up this issue provide critical insights into the problematic ways that history reflects ideology, spanning a broad range of topics including colonialism, legal compensation, folklore, urban planning, and literature. Each author shows how critiques of essentialized history reveal fractures in the logic of classification that demarcate and delineate boundaries of class, ethnicity, national identity, and law. With reference to these fractures, the articles collected here problematize paired conceptual categories such as privacy and sexuality, individual rights and public policy, immortality and rebirth, revolution and transcendent sovereignty, value and price, and stereotypes and typologies of cultural distinctiveness.
The first two articles are concerned with the legacies of war and imperialism in South Korea. Na Sil Heo provides a detailed analysis showing how the planning, design, and construction of housing in postwar South Korea should be understood as a project concerning the problematic modernity of the family...
