19 (Choi 1993, 92)

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(Choi 1993, 92)

The subversive reconstruction of the past has also involved appropriating and even inventing popular culture. The new theater genre called madang guk, the peoples theater, has been one of the most effective means to recapture dangerous memories. It is a powerful instrument that is used to politicize and mobilize a large segment of the population in South Korea. The theater is an effective medium for delivering the movement's propaganda messages, but not by way of raw slogans. Rather, it narrates the problematized realities of marginalized people within the framework of folk theater and shamanic ritual, and thus successfully attracts public attention. The term madang refers to a space where communal activities take place. The reinvested meaning of this space, however, invokes a utopian plentitude of the imagined non-periodized prelapsarian past and alludes to the advent of a postcapitalist unity in which the division between production and consumption collapses. Madang guk, then, is seen as a site where this utopia is to materialize through a carnivalesque communal festival and through a collective struggle against the ruling bourgeoisie as the commoners of the pre-rupture period are imagined to have carried it out. In addition to reintroducing this idea of classic utopian socialism, the ideology of madang guk adds an important historical dimension to the movement in that it constantly re-members the people's history or social memory as a part of discourse.