Fractal Spectrality and Postcolonial Futurity: Theological Imagination after the Korean War

Trauma is frequently framed as an individual psychological event, obscuring its collective, historical, and political dimensions. Focusing on the legacies of Japanese colonization and the Korean War, this paper theorizes collective trauma as a communal and postcolonial formation that exceeds individual models such as PTSD. Drawing on sociological accounts of social and cultural trauma, I argue that collective memory is politically curated yet also persists in more fluid, unsettled forms. To describe these dynamics, I integrate the concepts of spectrality and fractality. Spectrality names the haunting return of unresolved pasts that demand ethical response, while fractality provides a probabilistic model for understanding how such hauntings recur across generations without determinism. Grounded in phenomenological interviews with two intergenerational cohorts of Korean and Korean American Christians, this study demonstrates how historical trauma resurfaces within diasporic and reconstruction-era contexts, generating both disruption and the possibility of renewed theological imagination.