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Modern domesticity in colonial-era Korea has generally been understood using the twin parameters of nationalism and colonialism. Much less attention has been paid to the impact of a transpacific network, mainly between the US and Korea through the Christian missionary societies, on the formation of modern domesticity before, during and after Japanese colonial rule. In this presentation, I examine the ways in which Korea’s modern domesticity was shaped by not only Japanese colonial policies but also the notion of modernity that was transmitted, reinterpreted and performed through the transpacific network that had formed among the Korean elite and American missionaries. Taking the idea of “modern home” as a key locus where national, colonial and missionary projects converged, I demonstrate how the intimate private sphere was rendered as one of the most dynamic sites for uncovering the confluence of interaction between the local, the national and the global.

Hyaeweol Choi is Professor of Korean Studies at the Australian National University. Her research interests are in the areas of gender history, religion, and transnational studies. She is the author of Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways and New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook among others.

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ABSTRACT
In 1970, the Park Chung Hee regime imprisoned Kim Chi-ha for publishing Ojŏk (Five Bandits), a lengthy satirical poem that dared to call the government a band of thieves. The poet on trial then turned the court into a stage for further dramatizing his resistance. Nearly half a century later, the “candlelight revolution” that brought down Park Chung Hee’s daughter from power turned the streets and social media into a fluid offline-online stage for a phenomenonal drama of resistance. But the candlelight revolution was preceded by what might be called a “podcast revolution,” launched in 2011 by the wildly parodic Nakkomsu (I am a petty cheat). Examining the role of political satire through Ojŏk and Nakkomsu, the talk will address the transformation and media-specific potency of “laughtivism” in South Korean democratization.

BIOGRAPHY
Professor Youngju Ryu is Associate Professor of Korean Literature and Director of the Korean Language Program in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. Professor Ryu specializes in modern Korean literature and her areas of research expertise include aesthetics of dissidence, cultures of authoritarianism, and philosophies of reconciliation in twentieth-century Korea. She is the author of Writers of the Winter Republic: Literature and Resistance in Park Chung Hee’s Korea (Columbia University Press, 2016).

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South Korean and Japanese citizens have become increasingly influential in shaping their bilateral relations. The society-level influence on government interactions is especially clear when a publicized bilateral issue linked to national security prompts emotional involvement of mainstream citizens. For better or worse, democratic political structures of Japan and South Korea enable the two domestic societies to perform a “watchdog” function of limiting policy options available to government officials involved in publicized bilateral interactions.  This presentation focused on the Japan-South Korea bilateral relations during the last decade in order to illustrate this point. In the midst of the fast-changing regional security environment during this period, the two societies started to re-evaluate and re-examine their respective national security identities of the Cold War period.  Interestingly, these identity-shifts in both countries were first fueled by the changing domestic public attitude toward North Korea.   

The normative transformations initially sparked by the ‘North Korea factors’, however, also led to a ‘mutual security anxiety’ between Japanese and South Korean citizens, as they started to embrace a sense of uncertainty about the other side’s possible future trajectory as a potential threat to their own state. This societal-level mutual distrust from the last decade continues to provide a powerful ideational limit to the government-level bilateral interactions even up to today.

 Biography  Seung Hyok Lee is currently a Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, and an Associate at the Centre for the Study of Global Japan, Munk School of Global Affairs. Previously, he was a short-term Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Law, Hokkaido University, Japan, as well as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace and at the Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.  He also worked as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Renison University College, University of Waterloo, and as a Visiting Scholar at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs. Dr. Lee received his doctoral degree in Political Science (International Relations) at the University of Toronto in 2011. His research interest is domestic society’s influence on publicized foreign policy issues, with specific focus on Japan and the Korean Peninsula. He is the author of Japanese Society and the Politics of the North Korean Threat (University of Toronto Press, 2016), “North Korea in South Korea-Japan Relations as a Source of Mutual Security Anxiety among Democratic Societies,” (The International Relations of the Asia-Pacific), and “Be Mature and Distinguish the ‘Forest’ from the ‘Trees’: Overcoming Korea-Japan Disputes Based on Incompatible National Historical Narratives.” (Asteion)

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On January 20, 2009, a commercial building in Yongsan, a central district of Seoul, South Korea, erupted into flames. It was during a police crackdown of the building’s tenants-turned-evictees who were staging a protest against the redevelopment of the neighbourhood by occupying the building. During the fire, five protesters and one police officer died. In the aftermath of the tragedy, a heated debate ensued over who was accountable for the deaths – a debate that unfolded in courtrooms, in parliament, and on the streets. The Remnants 공동정범 follows the life of the evictees, who were incarcerated on a charge of the death of the policeman, raising questions about state violence, urban space, and democratic citizenship. Today, 9 years since the Yongsan tragedy, we hope this showing of the documentary the Remnants and the discussion with Min Sook Lee (documentary filmmaker and academic) and Jesook Song (urban anthropologist of Korea) will help us think through these important questions.

Min Sook Lee has directed numerous critically-acclaimed feature documentaries, including: Donald Brittain Gemini winner Tiger Spirit, Hot Docs Best Canadian Feature winner Hogtown, Gemini nominated El Contrato and Canadian Screen Award winner, The Real Inglorious Bastards and most recently, Canadian Hillman Prize winner Migrant Dreams. Lee is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Cesar E. Chavez Black Eagle Award, and the Alanis Obomsawin Award for Commitment to Community and Resistance. Lee is an Assistant Professor at OCAD University, her area of research and practice focuses on the critical intersections of art+social change in labour, border politics, migration and social justice movements.

Jesook Song is Professor of Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is an urban anthropologist with interests in housing, finance, welfare, labor, gender, and sexuality. Her first book, South Koreans in the Debt Crisis (Duke University Press, 2009) deals with homelessness and youth unemployment during the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s to early millennium. Her second book Living On Their Own (SUNY Press, 2014) is about single household and informal financial markets through single women’s struggle in South Korea.

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