UC San Diego

This dissertation is an encounter with Gangjeong Village. A fifteen-year sustained protest campaign against the construction of South Korea’s Jeju Naval Base has opened up a field of contestation of place. I consider these contestations through the struggle to “show up.” Showing up is an overlapping complex of concepts and practices combining the daily persistence of activism, the arrival and mobility of tourists, the clarification and maintenance of traditional local boundaries, and the use of sound and image to delineate, dispute, and demarcate places and modes of belonging. I argue that these practices form a unique platform for political intervention, addressing global political questions by continually re-situating itself in its immediate locality and in the process, transforming this small village on the south coast of Jeju Island into a site to confront the diffuse global political struggles of the climate crisis, colonialism, imperialism, militarism, and patriarchal domination. To examine this complex of practices, I trace how showing up occurs along two axes: the construction of a daily culture of protest and the strategies of defining and connecting locality with “elsewhere.” Through oral history and materialist media archaeology, I show the development of the Anti-Naval Base and Peace Movements from 2007 to 2023 and analyze the contemporary practices of daily resistance through music, performance, and visual culture analyses. Through these lenses, I argue that activists have produced a unique combination of life and protest, one that combines the politicization of the everyday with the cultivation of protest actions into a generalized way of being in the world. With a detailed account of the aesthetic considerations, media productions, critical analyses, and intentionally cultivated frameworks of daily life, Gangjeong Village has been turned into a site of political and conceptual experimentation, where the immediate and material work of concepts like belonging, arrival, peace, and place, are produced through the immediate and material work of organizing protest actions, maintaining activist infrastructures, and developing new community institutions. Building on this analysis, the place of Gangjeong Village is contested by the military and the peace activists through a series of counter-constructions: through the built environment, the visual landscape, the field of sound, and the international networks of solidarity and alliance, each composing a different world of relation and distinction. In Gangjeong Village, showing up, appearing, arriving, persisting, enacting, creating, revealing, and living through protest creates a form of action that does not interrupt life but is a living interruption, the removal of the distinction between life and struggle, and a vision of political action that can be sustained without end.