"Trauma in Public and Private: Songs of the South Korean Survivors of the Japanese Military 'Comfort Women'"

Joshua Pilzer, Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Music, Columbia University

During the long era of public secrecy about Japanese military sexual slavery, Korean survivors made use of veiled expressive forms such as song to reckon with their experiences and forge social selves without exposing their already opaquely public secrets. In the era of the “comfort women grandmothers” protest movement, which began in the early 1990s, the women became star witnesses and super-symbols of South Korea’s colonial victimization at the hands of Japan; and the new normative constraints of this role compelled the women to continue to express taboo sentiments and continue the work of self-making behind the veils of song, often in the most public of places. The women’s songs are thus simultaneously records of traumatic experiences; transcripts of struggles with traumatic memory; performances of traumatic experience for an expectant public; and works of art that stretch beyond the horizons of traumatic experience and Korean cultural identity.

Joshua Pilzer is a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Music at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in Music from the University of Chicago in 2005 and previously taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara.