| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday, March 7, 2013 | 2:00PM - 4:00PM | Seminar Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs 1 Devonshire Place |
In 1970, just as the second decade of Park Chung Hee’s authoritarian rule was about to begin, an aging American poet made a difficult trip to Korea. Muriel Rukeyser, then the head of the American Center for International P.E.N., hoped to meet Kim Chi-Ha, a dissident poet awaiting the death sentence in prison. Four years earlier, a prominent intellectual of Japan’s New Left named Tsurumi Shunsuke had made the same trip to meet the Korean poet, who was then under house arrest in a sanatorium. These attempts at humanitarian intervention ran aground, however, and resulted in two out-of-joint dialogues that reveal much about the politics of global dissidence in the Cold War era. The talk examines these dialogues, preserved in Rukeyser’s poems and Tsurumi’s interview, as occasions for thinking about the role of literature in Yushin Korea and conditions of possibility for intellectual solidarity in East Asia under “Pax Americana.”
Youngju Ryu is Assistant Professor of Korean Literature at the University of Michigan and the author of forthcoming Writers of the Winter Republic: South Korean Literature and the Ethics of Resistance.
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