For 15 years, South Korea’s Gangjeong Village has been a site of a community protest against the Jeju Naval Base (Yoon 2017). These protests are held thrice daily, with bows at sunrise, a morning catholic protest mass, and a noon march to the gate of the naval base where military hardware is faced with songs and dances. Over the years, these protests have moved from violent confrontations with international media attention to a sustained series of events where activists from around the world gather to train as peace activists for their own struggles. This shift from confrontation to daily resistance has changed the focus of protests to acts of memory for environmental and religious sites destroyed by the base and acts of relation, building chains of between feminists, queer activists, environmental activists, anti-war activists and the labor movement.
This struggle is, in part, a contest over the meaning of peace and the tools used to depict it (Kim N 2018). In recognition of a century of atrocities, including Japanese colonization, the 4.3 massacre of 1947-48, and the cultural genocide of the 1970s, Jeju Island was legally designated the “Island of Peace” in 2005. The imposition of the naval base forced the debate into the public sphere. Would peace be the securing of territorial waters and natural resources, would it be the absence of military violence. While the struggle is multifaceted, this paper will address how it arises within the sonic practices of Gangjeong village. These songs, chants, speeches, and acts of public religious worship have come to form the spine of the daily protests. As the physical confrontations receded, they were replaced by sonic disputes, as protest sounds and military noise confront each other in both the symbolic and the sonic registers. The national anthem and peace chants mix in the mornings, the roadside chapel fights to be heard over construction equipment, and soldiers stage unofficial counter-protests by playing EDM and K-pop on their phones during speeches and protest songs. This question about sound has also become a point of contention within the peace movement itself. New activists are shifting the meaning of old sounds, opening up new experiments in noise making and sonic enactments of space, and reflecting the sounds of the village back to itself as the subject of documentation and performance. (Melitopoulos 2015, Kim SE 2017, Kaisen 2022)
The sounds of Gangjeong Village display a unique dimension of political action, where concrete aesthetics and tactics meet the formalisms of myth and symbol. In doing so, the Gangjeong Village Peace movement combined a tradition of Korean protests taking sonic space as contested territory (Abelmann 1996) with their tactics of sustained serial protests. These “ecotonal zones” (Tausig 2019) coordinate a certain structure of force. By examining practices and the relations that they compose, this paper will argue that sound emphasizes the coordinating power of collective art-work, while suggesting ways of conceptualizing long-term struggle as a rhythmic act of maintenance rather than a violent eruption.
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Kaisen, Jane Jin. Burial of this Order, 2022. https://janejinkaisen.com/burial-of-this-order-2022
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