Laboring Intellectuals, Writing Workers: A New Critical Perspective on 1980s-1990s South Korean Cultural History

Laboring Intellectuals, Writing Workers: A New Critical Perspective on 1980s-1990s South Korean Cultural History

The decade of the 1980s in South Korea is often remembered for its rapid economic growth and the robust outburst of pro-democracy desires that eventually ended decades of military dictatorship. This article seeks to foster a fresh understanding of the era by reorienting our focus to the underground network of solidarity among workers, intellectuals, and student activists that gave birth to a distinct dissident cultural politics and literature. More specifically, this study re-examines the intellectual, cultural, and literary history of 1980s-1990s Korea in light of the changing relation between labor and intellect at the heart of this history. During the period of the democratization movement, intellectuals and student activists not only upheld the idea of the worker-student alliance but also put it into praxis in various ways. The working class, on its part, underwent a process of class consciousness awakening and subjectification through their interactions with the intellectuals. The fruitful development of labor literature in the 1980s-1990s, a time of subversion in South Korean cultural history, stands as a monument to the labor-intellect collaboration.