Global perspectives on the Jeju
This chapter provides a snapshot of how the Jeju Uprising and Massacre has been covered in English in the years since its occurance. The chapter is split into three sections beginning with contemporaneous international reporting in the late 1940s.
This flurry of reports in 1948 and 1949 was followed by a long period of silence due to the outbreak of the Korean War (1950-53) and limits on freedom of expression before democratization in 1987. The second section introduces the scholarly work of John Merrill and Bruce Cumings whose historical analyses, critical of the American role in the massacre, are early landmarks in English-language coverage of the massacre in the 1980s and 1990s.
The third section moves forward to the new millennium as the broad theme becomes the struggle for transitional justice with press reports from Howard W. French, Hamish McDonald and Andrew Salmon. Finally, the fourth section is devoted to coverage in The Jeju Weekly, the island’s sole English-language press outlet, which was the first to bring many of the massacre’s key debates to an international audience in recent years. All photographs that accompany the content of this chapter were selected specifically for this book and were not originally published with the source material.
