Description

This talk is interested in how Korean literary and cultural critics have defined the idea of literature and what roles the idea serves in their larger arguments about the human being and history. It focuses in particular on mid-century Korea, from the late Japanese colonial period until the 1950s. The intention behind this periodization is to recognize both continuity and discontinuity between “before and after liberation,” particularly in relation to concepts of the human and their intersection with imperial, colonial, and national politics. Through texts by Paek Ch’ŏl, Ch’oe Chaesŏ, Sŏ Insik, and An Hamgwang, published in the Japanese empire, South Korea, and North Korea, I will discuss how and why these critics conceived of literature as the most important mediation between transcendental concepts, including moral and political ideas, and the everyday experiences of modernity. This situating of literature between ideas and experience was connected to the figure of the human, the “empirico-transcendental doublet” of modernity (Foucault), and thereby to modes of governmentality between Japanese empire, US and Soviet occupation, and the Korean national population. This talk comes out of a current book project, a collection of translations titled Humanism, Empire, and Nation: Korean Literary and Cultural Criticism.

Travis Workman is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is the author of Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). He has published articles in journals such as PMLA and positions and book chapters in volumes such as The Korean Popular Culture Reader and Rediscovering Korean Cinema. He is currently working on a collection of translations, Humanism, Empire, and Nation: Korean Literary and Cultural Criticism and a book manuscript, Political Moods: Melodrama and the Cold War in Korean Film.

Description

Through the interrogation rooms of the Korean War, this talk demonstrates how the individual human subject became both the terrain and the jus ad bellum for this critical U.S. war of ‘intervention’ in postcolonial Korea. In 1952, with the US introduction of voluntary POW repatriation proposal at Panmunjom, the interrogation room and the POW became a flashpoint for an international controversy ultimately about postcolonial sovereignty and political recognition.

The ambitions of empire, revolution and non-alignment converged upon this intimate encounter of military warfare: the interrogator and the interrogated prisoner of war. Which state could supposedly reinvent the most intimate power relation between the colonizer and the colonized, to transform the relationship between the state and subject into one of liberation, democracy or freedom? Tracing two generations of people across the Pacific as they navigate multiple kinds of interrogation from the 1940s and 1950s, this talk lay outs a landscape of interrogation – a dense network of violence, bureaucracy, and migration – that breaks apart the usual temporal bounds of the Korean War as a discrete event.

Monica Kim is Assistant Professor in U.S. and the World History in the Department of History at New York University. Her book, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton University Press), is a trans-Pacific history of decolonization told through the experiences of two generations of people creating and navigating military interrogation rooms of the Korean War. She has published work in journals such as Critical Asian Studiesand positions: asia critiqueconcerning U.S. empire, war-making, and decolonization. She is also a member of the Editorial Collective for Radical History Review. Her research and writing have been supported by fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the Penn Humanities Forum at University of Pennsylvania, and the Korea Foundation.

*Copies of “The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History” will be available for sale during this event.