Reclaiming Bodies, Freeing Souls Evoking Transcultural Empathy in Han Kang’s Human Acts (2016)
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Abstract
First published in Korean, Han Kang's Human Acts depicts the brutal massacre and the military's violent suppression during the 1980 Gwangju Uprising to share the long-lasting impact of the traumatic event with audiences across time and space. The acknowledgement of shared trauma, regardless of geography, time and culture, is strongly indicated by Han's conscious decision not to celebrate her Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of the persistent violence against humanity in the ongoing wars around the world (Noh 2024). Addressing the reception of trauma narratives, this article examines how Human Acts evokes readers' transcultural empathy for shared trauma arising from war and civil unrest. To this end, it applies recent approaches to embodied reading by Caracciolo and Kukkonen as well as concepts in trauma studies, including (implicated) witnessing, affect and transcultural empathy. Its analyses of passages with detailed and defamiliarizing depictions of the human body (body parts, viscerality and senses) in the realist setting illustrate how readers affectively enact "what it is like" to be involved in the uprising through their "virtual bodies" (Caracciolo 2014). The disruptions in the embodied reading process implicate recipients in the secondary witnessing of violence (Rothberg 2019) and elicit their acknowledgement of shared trauma through embodied means, which "can build bridges between people from diverse historical backgrounds" (Garloff 2020, 211). Moreover, by figuratively reclaiming the students' bodies through their virtual bodies, readers assist in the important Korean spiritual process of freeing the lost souls of Gwangju from the trauma and towards the afterlife. The article thus argues that recipients' post-reading recognition of their collective responsibility against injustices against humanity can "lead to new versions of collective politics that build on alliances and assemblages of differently situated subjects" (Rothberg 2019, 21).
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