Description

This presentation explores “folded time” in which the present disappears through the imperative of cure in South Korea. By folding time, cure demands temporal crossings to a past through “rehabilitation” and “recovery” and to a future without disabilities and illnesses. By thinking about the imperative of cure as a time machine, Kim explores the possibility of inhabiting in the present with disability and illness. Cure appears as an attempt at category-crossing from otherness to normality, which reveals the multiplicity of the boundaries that divide “human” and “inhuman” as well as “life” and “nonlife.” Kim also discusses the temporal trap into which discussions of non-Western societies in Western academic contexts might fall, one that denies coevalness or universalizes disability experiences across different cultural and historical contexts. In this analysis, cure is reframed, not as unequivocally beneficial nor politically harmful, but as a set of political, moral, economic, emotional, and ambivalent negotiations.

Eunjung Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and Disability Studies Program at Syracuse University. Her research and teaching involve transnational feminist disability studies, visual cultures, Korean cultural history of disability and activism, humanitarian communications, asexuality theories, and queer inhumanism.

Description

Since 1990, when the Soviet Union and South Korea established diplomatic ties, over 4,000 Koreans from Sakhalin Island (Russia) have “returned” to their so-called ethnic homeland, now in South Korea. This return migration program has been supported by the Japanese and South Korean governments, named a humanitarian aid, with older Sakhalin Koreans being granted citizenship in South Korea. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on Sakhalin in South Korea (2010-2011, 2016), I present everyday experiences of citizenship among older Sakhalin Koreans in a transnational setting. This return project, offering a range of material and social assistance, has provoked new aspirations to live; at the same time it entails a new sense of unfairness, moral discourses around dependency, contested claim-making practice, and reflections of self through Others. These experiences show the ways older Sakhalin Koreans negotiate moral and political personhood as they reconfigure historically shaped relations to key nation-states including Japan, Russia, and South Korea. Situating the practices and imaginaries of citizenship of older Sakhalin Koreans within the shifting geopolitics of Northeast Asia, this study offers an analysis and understanding of subjectivities in the times of post-colonial and post-cold war transformations.

Sungsook Lim completed her Master’s degree in Anthropology at Hanyang University in Korea in 2004, and continued to study anthropology in the Ph.D. program at the University of British Columbia. Her PhD research project considered return mobility among older Sakhalin Koreans, specially focusing on their kinship and citizenship practices. Sungsook completed her PhD degree in 2016, and is currently a post-doctoral fellow of the Korea Foundation.

Description

Lecture Abstract:

The Korean War was in fact two wars: the first was fought over territory from June 1950 to June 1951; the second was over prisoners, especially the Chinese prisoners wishing to “return to Taiwan,” from late 1951 to July 1953. While the first war restored territorial status quo ante, the second war’s only visible outcome was the “defection” of 14,220 Chinese prisoners to Taiwan and 7,574 North Korean prisoners to South Korea—at the cost of doubling the length of the war and numerous casualties on all sides. Contrary to the Communist allegation of an American conspiracy, this outcome was unplanned. Two separately conceived U.S. policies—prisoner reindoctrination and voluntary repatriation—became intertwined and resulted in the rise of anti-Communist prisoners, who soon hijacked the war agenda. The U.S. government became hostage to its own moralistic but ultimately hypocritical policy and to prisoners—a reality so embarrassing that it has remained largely unknown to the American people. Using archival documents and oral histories, this talk will examine the interplay between policies and prisoners’ actions. It will also chart the extraordinary experiences of several prisoner leaders.

Speaker Bio:

David Cheng Chang (常成) is an Assistant Professor of History at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He received his Ph.D. in modern Chinese history from the University of California, San Diego in 2011. He studies the Korean War, the Cold War, U.S.-China relations, and the history of war photography.

Description

This paper, which I wrote with Seung-Cheol Lee, gives attention to the coexistence between increasing concerns about the “crisis” of society and increasing “social construction” projects exercised in the name of “the social.” Under circumstances where neoliberal doctrines penetrate deep into a realm of subjectification, how can we understand the reality that “society” is central to state governance and, furthermore, reconstructed as an ethical field? With an eye to recent projects of social construction in South Korea and China, this study aims to answer the following inquiries. How can social construction projects be analyzed and contextualized in countries where the state did not go through the so-called stage of “social government” found in the Western welfare state? How does the state accomplish a double mission to disperse its functions to social realms and re-articulate managerial power when it intervenes in social construction projects? How do various participants in social construction projects in the two countries experience and react to the tensions between “society” as the assemblage of social rights, solidarities, and socialities, and “society” as the target of state governance and engineered projects?

Mun Young Cho is an associate professor of the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Yonsei University, South Korea. Her research focuses on poverty, labor, development, and youth in China and South Korea. She is the author of the book The Specter of “The People”: Urban Poverty in Northeast China (Cornell University Press, 2013).