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Haejoang Cho will be speaking as a ‘native anthropologist’ about her whirlwind journey experiencing South Korea’s compressed modernity since the 1980’s. The discussion begins with the recent 4/16 Sewol Ferry Disaster in Jindo, that has resonated with 9/11 and the 3/11 Disaster in Fukushima. Professor Cho will focus on the split of South Korean public responses into disparate antagonistic groups; those who say to “never forget”, and those who urge to “forget and go back to normal life”, The discussion will elaborate on concepts of ‘risk society’ and ‘reflexivity’ and ‘mourning’ and ‘violence’ in its analysis of compressed modernity and global capitalism as the lived experiences of people in South Korea.

Haejoang Cho is cultural anthropologist in training and feminist in faith. She is a professor Emeritus of Yonsei University, Seoul. Her early research focused on gender studies in Korean modern history; her current interests and research are in the area of youth culture and modernity in the global/local and post-colonial context of modern day Korea. Cho is the founding director of Haja center (The Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture) which is an alternative educational and cultural studio for the teenagers since 1999. The Haja project has been launched as a part of ‘action research’ of solving the problems of youth from the perspectives of feminism, cultural studies and ecological studies in the rapidly globalizing East Asian context.

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This lecture will focus on the precarious youth at the Haja Center (the Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture) and their survival politics based on Professor Haejoang Cho’s pedagogical and socio-political experiments. In the rapidly globalizing East Asian context, the project has evolved responding proactively to national and global crises; the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the 2008-2009 global financial crises, and the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Interested in a pedagogy that connects life and learning, Cho has endeavored to create platforms that enable new types of learning in various forms including a youth center, an alternative school, an after-school community, and a transition town. This discussion will explain the launching of these platforms and the discussion of anticipated new projects. As Ulrich Beck termed as “emancipatory catastrophism”, the power of transformation is coming from a keen awareness of recent economic, social, and natural crises. It is unprecedented, fundamental, and globally shared, rather than as isolated and unique. Hence, the youths would be able to bring their experiences and observation of crises into an “epochal transformation” of learning through actively connecting platforms of various kinds, creatively turning their connections into a new one.

Haejoang Cho is cultural anthropologist in training and feminist in faith. She is a professor Emeritus of Yonsei University, Seoul. Her early research focused on gender studies in Korean modern history; her current interests and research are in the area of youth culture and modernity in the global/local and post-colonial context of modern day Korea. Cho is the founding director of Haja center (The Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture) which is an alternative educational and cultural studio for the teenagers since 1999. The Haja project has been launched as a part of ‘action research’ of solving the problems of youth from the perspectives of feminism, cultural studies and ecological studies in the rapidly globalizing East Asian context.

3PM – 5PM – Lecutre
5PM – 6PM – Informal Reception

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Born in Hwanghae Province, North Korea, Kim Keum-hwa is one of Korea’s greatest shamans. She has been honoured as a national treasure of Korea for her outstanding talent in singing and dancing. However, her impressive career is accompanied by the history of oppression of shamanism throughout the 20th century, from the Japanese colonial period to the Korean War, to the New Community Movement in the 70s.

A thought-provoking, sensational documentary from Park Chan-kyong (Day Trip 2013, Night Fishing 2011), Manshin provides an in-depth look at the indigenous religious belief of shamanism told through the famed shaman Kim Keum-hwa’s life story. The film depicts Korea’s modern history on a micro-level through the eyes of Shaman Kim, who is destined to respond up-close to the sufferings of others. It also reveals the power of forgiveness and reconciliation of Korean shamanism, which has survived oppression while performing different kinds of “Gut” rituals in relation to certain periods of modern Korea. Kim appears in new as well as rare archival footage, and is portrayed in animation and fantasy sequences. Viewers are transported through past and present, with notable reenactments by actors Moon So-ri, Kim Sae-ron, and Ryoo Hun-kyung.

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Since the end of the Cold War, China has become a global symbol of disregard for human rights, while the United States has positioned itself as the world’s chief exporter of the rule of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified empirically, and how did the United States assume the mantle of law’s universal appeal?

In a series of wide-ranging inquiries, Teemu Ruskola investigates the history of “legal Orientalism”: a set of globally circulating narratives about what law is and who has it. For example, why is China said not to have a history of corporate law, as a way of explaining its “failure” to develop capitalism on its own? Ruskola shows how a European tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire, tracing back to the first Sino–U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China., creating a kind of legal imperialism causing enduring damage to legal Orientlalism to this day.

Teemu Ruskola is Professor of Law at Emory University. His scholarship addresses questions of legal history and theory from multiple perspectives, comparative as well as international, frequently with China as a vantage point. Most recently, he is the author of Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law (Harvard, 2013).

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The Centre for the Study of Korea is pleased to present the launch of Professor Janet Poole’s When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University). Prof. Poole’s new book takes a panoramic view of Korea’s dynamic literary production in the final decade of Japanese rule, locating the imprint of a new temporal sense in Korean modernism: the impression of time interrupted, with no promise of a future. As colonial subjects of an empire headed toward total war, Korean writers in this global fascist moment produced some of the most sophisticated writings of twentieth-century modernism.

Professor Poole teaches Korean literature and cultural history at the University of Toronto and is a a faculty affiliate of the Centre for the Study of Korea at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs. She has translated the works of many writers from colonial Korea, including Yi T’aejun’s Eastern Sentiments.

For more information on the book and to purchase the book, please click on the link below.