The Politics of Silence and Nostalgia: The Emotional Landscape of Structural Violence in Coal and Post-Mining Communities

This study offers a comparative analysis of representations of coal mining and post-mining communities in Anglophone and South Korean media. It examines how industrial decline operates as structural violence and how it is socially organized into distinct affective forms through the lens of “affective regimes.” The findings show that Anglophone media represent coal mining within an affective regime in which anger, resistance, and reflective nostalgia coexist and evolve over an extended period. Within this framework, affect maintains its orientation toward identifiable political targets, thereby sustaining its connection to the public sphere. In contrast, South Korean media depict a trajectory in which affect is subsumed into silence, resignation, and privatization, becoming fixed within the landscape before it can be mobilized into collective political action. This study conceptualizes this pattern as a “compressed affective regime,” in which rapid deindustrialization leads structural violence to be internalized within individual lives and spaces, preventing it from being constituted as an object of resistance. By doing so, the study positions affect as a central analytical category in deindustrialization studies and proposes a critical framework for understanding how structural violence is reconfigured into forms of emotion and memory within the dynamics of place and power.