What is it about?
This is Chapter 2 in my first research monograph, entitled New Forms of Self-Narration: Young Women, Life Writing and Human Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). This chapter looks at how Hyeonseo Lee imbricates personal memory and collective suffering in her life-writing activism. She has become a spokesperson for North Koreans at both national and international levels, giving public talks where she explains hardships she endured and witnessed.
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Why is it important?
In 2013, TED.com released Lee’s talk. The instability of US-DPRK relations at the time made it an instant sensation, which proves life writing is inseparable from politics. The interplay of offline and online self-construction expands the notion of what used to be separate realms but have become one entangled narrative. Her memoir profited from the viral TED talk and vice versa.
Perspectives
Deploying social media for human rights activism, Lee’s life writing succeeds in raising awareness for a collective via multimodal means of self-expression. Though Lee's memoir had received multiple reviews, no research had compared the print text to her public appearances. Moreover, no one had analyzed all the texts as part of an entangled whole.
Dr Ana Belén Martínez García
Universidad de Navarra
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Hyeonseo Lee: Seeking Justice for the North Korean People on TED.com, January 2020, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-46420-2_3.
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