| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, March 4, 2011 | 12:00PM - 2:00PM | Seminar Room 208N, Munk Centre For International Studies 1 Devonshire Place |
North Korea is a workshop of democracy in today’s world. The human rights of North Korean refugees define the global democracy project, while the marketization in North Korea is exalted as a forerunner of democratization. At this juncture, this talk construes North Korean refugees as the displaced from the common properties and state-assigned jobs and examines the consequent process of their commodification. It takes the memory of socialism as a site where the state and individuals reconfigure their relationship. In specific, the talk discusses the North Korean state’s double edged relation with the emergent capitalist order which prompts an inquiry into the reconstituted meaning of socialism. It also probes subjectivities of the displaced who respond to the trinity of the market, evangelism, and ethnic nationalism, and articulate memories of socialism in their imagination of the new common.
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Hyun Ok Park is an Associate Professor of Sociology at York University. She is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively entitled, “Desire for Return: Colonial Memory, Neoliberal Capitalism, and the Korean Transnational Migration.” She is the author of Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Duke University Press, 2005).
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