ABSTRACT
The chapter examines two separate protest self-burnings – one that took place in South Korea in 1970, and the other in Tunisia in 2010. The auto-cremation of Chun Tae-il, a young worker and activist struggling to improve labour conditions, was performed in order to publicise the inhuman treatment suffered by South Korean textile workers in the rapidly developing country. The self-incineration of Mohamed Bouazizi, a young Tunisian street vendor, stirred civil unrest, ultimately leading to the outbreak of the Arab Spring. In both cases, the self-burnings were acts performed by subalterns excluded from mainstream economic systems, who sought to reclaim their agency. The first subchapter – A Drop of Dew – devoted to Chun’s protest investigates the performer’s life and death, the aftermath of his act, its impact on public life in South Korea, and commemorative practices that emerged in its wake. Its final section analyses Park Kwang-su’s feature film A Single Spark (1995), selected for interpretation as the most remarkable artistic response to Chun’s deed. The second subchapter – The Drop That Made the Cup Overflow – deconstructs Bouazizi’s iconic, media-created persona and examines the historical, economic, and religious contexts of his act, highlighting the role that framing and hybrid media networks played in transforming a street vendor into a symbol of the revolution. The final section delves into Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novella By Fire (2011), the clearest attempt to restore a measure of individuality to Bouazizi.
