Youth for Nation: Culture and Protest in Cold War South Korea. By Charles R. Kim. Honolulu, Hawai'i: University of Hawai'i Press, 2017. xi + 264 pp.[ISBN: 9780824855949]

Abstract

Charles R. Kim’s Youth for Nation represents an impressive effort to trace the evolution of South Korean ideology from 1953 to 1964. As the author informs the reader in the beginning of his study, South Korea’s state-backed ideology was but a “version of public discourse supported by power” (p. 14). That is, both the state’s ideology and public discourse shared a common discursive territory, enabling individuals to contest the hegemonial claims of the state in the same language as was employed by the state. In his pursuit of these discursive struggles, Kim isolates two especially poignant manifestations of South Korea’s discourse: “wholesome modernization” and “the student vanguard.” The South Korean state promoted both, paying particular attention to the inculcation of the young generation. Kim thus shows that protesters’ self-rationalization during the 4.19 Revolution in 1960 grew organically out of the state-sponsored discourse that the youth had internalized. Put differently, student protest in the April of 1960 was the specter conjured up by the very regime against which it eventually turned. The author unfolds his argument in a series of six chapters (discussed