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Escaping from the Culture of Terror: Modern Taiwanese History and the Mnemonic Site

  • Asia Review
  • Abbr : SNUACAR
  • 2020, 10(2), pp.195~227
  • Publisher : 아시아연구소
  • Research Area : Social Science > Social Science in general
  • Received : October 15, 2020
  • Accepted : December 4, 2020
  • Published : December 31, 2020

Youngjin Lee 1

1강원대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Memorial parks and halls have recently been built in Taiwan to commemorate the victims persecuted and killed in the 2.28 Incident and the white terror period. In this manuscript, I examine memory-practice that underlie the exhibits displayed in the memorial parks and halls that are intended to remember the sense of terror in the course of the modern history of Taiwan. The advent of the process of democratization in Taiwan in 1987 introduced possible public discourse on the 2.28 incident, which had been regarded as one of the most sensitive topics in Taiwan’s modern political history. The effort to develop various memory-practices in order to remember and commemorate the brutal past among civic groups since then may be regarded as one of the major achievements of Taiwan’s social democratization movement. Recently built places of commemoration, such as the 2.28 Memorial Hall and the Jingmei and Ludao Human Rights and Cultural Center, are said to play multiple important roles, such as creating public narratives against terrorism and horror, handing down the narratives to young generations, and regenerating the suppressed truth of the past through these memories, which may provide the sense of healing for victims. However, in my view, these mnemonic sites suffer a major limitation in identifying clear implications of the massacre to the present Taiwanese society since many exhibits in the sites simply describe the 2.28 incident and subsequent white terror as unfortunate events that occurred in the distant past. This limitation is attributed to the fact that the past history has not been properly liquidated, such as the lack of the investigation and legal punishment of culprits who ordered massacres and white terrorism, despite the provision of compensation for the victims. Due to this limitation, mnemonic sites for commemorating Taiwan’s bitter past are characterized by a strange juxtaposition of human rights and culture continues rather than frank confrontation of dark political forces in its modern history. In this regard, they may serve as a mirror for Koreans, who also recently struggled to engage in memory-practice in order to commemorate their own tragic events and white terrorism. I conclude by noting that the joint effort to overcome the limitation of commemorating recent bitter historical events between Taiwanese and Korean civic societies appears to be the only way to properly bid farewell to the culture of terror that dominated East Asia in the 20th century.

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