Feeling toward Decoloniality: Transnational Solidarity Efforts to Seek Redress for Survivors of War Violence

Abstract

This project investigates the recent contentious strides of the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance, a well-established South Korean organization seeking redress for Korean survivors of wartime sexual slavery. Stirring intense controversy within Korea, since 2013, the organization started expressing solidarity with survivors of massacres and gender-based violence perpetrated by Korean soldiers during the VietNam War. This project pays attention to this rather bold development in the Korean Council’s work. It focuses on a particularly striking component called the ‘VietNam Butterfly Peace Trips.’ Every year, the Korean Council gathers its allies to visit sites of memorialization and meet Vietnamese survivors. These trips are intended to invoke learning and alternative future imaginings through characteristically emotional experiences. Drawing on the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality (MCD) framework, I first argue that modernity/coloniality is central to discourses that thwart the VietNam War redress movement and its solidarity work with the Korean Council. This provides a stepping stone for my second argument that emotions arising from the Peace Trips behold decolonial potential. By bringing in emotional scholarship rooted in feminist struggles, this thesis demonstrates how emotion as an analytical device can sharpen the critique of modernity/coloniality. In turn, emotion, when taken seriously, can lead to buddings of radical politics.