Curated ruins: emotional governance and the memory politics of forgetting-by-design in postcolonial Seoul

This paper examines how Seoul’s urban landscape sustains postcolonial forgetting not through neglect but through deliberate design. Across infrastructures, symbolic demolitions, and heritage zones, the city curates a spatial order that displaces historical confrontation in favor of emotional resolution. Drawing on theories of affect and postcolonial memory, it identifies three interlocking strategies of forgetting-by-design: infrastructural silence, where colonial systems are absorbed and obscured; affective demolition, where erasure is staged as public catharsis; and aesthetic simulation, where curated tradition masks rupture. Through case studies in Seoul—the colonial waterworks, the 1995–96 demolition of the Government-General Building, and the remaking of Bukchon Hanok Village and Gwanghwamun Square—it reveals how colonial inheritances are converted into symbolic comfort. These curated ruins do not critically engage with colonial afterlives; instead, they offer spectacle without reckoning, producing nationalism through managed absence. The contribution is twofold: first, to foreground infrastructure as an active agent of erasure and critique the contradictory system governing colonial legacies; second, to propose a conceptual tool for memory governance that reads curated ruins as systems of emotional and spatial management. Ultimately, repair will require not more remembrance, but different remembrance—grounded in accountability, spatial disclosure, and sustained engagement with imperial afterlives.