Description

Event series: Race & Anti-Racism across the Asia-Pacific

In recent years, many commentators have bemoaned the dissolution of the liberal capitalist world order that has been called “Pax Americana.” In this logic, the occupations of Germany and Japan have been declared triumphs that inaugurated a rules-based global order that lasted for more than seventy years. The United States has been figured as the “global good cop” that insured peace, security, and prosperity throughout the planet, so that its recent decline on the world stage and a supposed isolationist mood is now being countered by new visions calling forth another world order dependent upon the massive militarization of minor and major powers throughout the world. This panel begins with the acknowledgement that the period of Pax Americana was far from peaceful and non-violent for most of the formerly colonized, indigenous, and racialized peoples of the world. Despite national and state/provincial celebrations of inclusion, multiculturalism, and reconciliation, our three panelists with expertise across the Asia-Pacific–including on Okinawa, Hawaiʻi, and postcolonial Koreans in Japan–reflect on the limits of this discourse on Pax Americana.

Description

BOOK TALK

Minor Transpacific: Triangulating American, Japanese, and Korean Fictions (Standford University Press)

There is a tendency to think of Korean American literature—and Asian American literature writ large—as a field of study involving only two spaces, the United States and Korea, with the same being true in Asian studies of Korean Japanese (Zainichi) literature involving only Japan and Korea. This book posits that both fields have to account for three spaces: Korean American literature has to grapple with the legacy of Japanese imperialism in the United States, and Zainichi literature must account for American interventions in Japan. Comparing Korean American authors such as Younghill Kang, Chang-rae Lee, Ronyoung Kim, and Min Jin Lee with Zainichi authors such as Kaneshiro Kazuki, Yi Yang-ji, and Kim Masumi, Minor Transpacific uncovers their hidden dialogue and imperial concordances, revealing the trajectory and impact of both bodies of work. Minor Transpacific bridges the fields of Asian studies and Asian American studies to unveil new connections between Zainichi and Korean American literatures. Working in Japanese and English, David S. Roh builds a theoretical framework for articulating those moments of contact between minority literatures in a third national space and proposes a new way of conceptualizing Asian American literature.

David S. Roh is Professor of English at the University of Utah, where he specializes in Asian American literature and Digital Humanities.  He is the author of Minor Transpacific (Stanford University Press, 2021), Illegal Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), and coeditor of Techno-Orientalism (Rutgers University Press, 2015). His work has appeared in Law & Literature, Journal of Narrative Theory, MELUS, Verge, and Digital Humanities Quarterly.  He is currently at work on Techno-Orientalism, Vol. II.

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Department of English, Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, Department of East Asian Studies, the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, the Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto.

Description

BOOK TALK

This talk is based on the book, Mediating the Korean Other: Representations and Discourses of Difference in the Post/Neocolonial Nation-State (University of Michigan Press, 2022), edited by David Oh.

Abstract: The book talk addresses the ways in which alterity is mediated in South Korean popular culture. With Korea’s complicated postcolonial legacy with Japan and its neocolonial relationship with the United States, the Korean ethnoscape is produced through a negotiation between various ways of understanding difference: its own indigenous notions of difference, its incorporation and resistance to Japanese notions of difference, and its interpretations of U.S. and Western racial hierarchy. Although racial frames have been applied to the study of Korea and its sensemaking around difference, this book talk argues that doing so is reductive and problematically asserts Western-centrism by applying a Western framework to understand non-Western spaces. Thus, drawing on a postcolonial ethos, Dr. Oh argues that to understand alterity and its mediation in South Korea, it is important to take seriously indigenous epistemologies. To do so, Dr. Oh translates the local word for discrimination, injongchabyeol, to English as “anthrocategorism" in order to recognize that Korea’s construction of alterity is locally specific. It incorporates race and ethnocentrism but, anthrocategorism is not reducible to either. Instead, the representations of anthrocategorism in Korean mediated spaces reflects ambivalent, complex negotiations of multiple types of cultural capital in formulations of who is represented and understood as more valued and normal and who is not. The talk draws upon the various contributions to the edited book to demonstrate the complexities of anthrocategorism in Korean ethno- and mediascapes.

David Oh is an Associate Professor of Communication Arts at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He is the author of Second-Generation Korean American Adolescent Identity and Media: Diasporic Identifications and Whitewashing the Movies: White Subjectivity and Asian Erasure in U.S. Film Culture. He has also co-written Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work (forthcoming) and edited Mediating the Korean Other: Representations and Discourses of Difference in the Post/Neocolonial Nation-State. Dr. Oh writes about Asian/American representation in U.S. media culture, representations of alterity in Korean media culture, and transnational audience reception of Korean media. He serves on eight Editorial Boards in communication, cultural studies, and media studies, and he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar to South Korea in 2018-19 at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

Description

Program

2:30 pm. Opening remarks and introduction

2:45 pm. Presentation by Jungmin Seo (20-25 minutes)

               "Agents and Victims of Korean Nationalism: From History to Politics"

3:10 pm. Presentation by Young Chul Cho (20-25 minutes)

               “Decolonizing International Relations Studies through Korean Literature”

3:35 pm. Presentation by Hye Min Ryu (20-25 minutes)

                "Korean Feminism and Backlash politics in South Korea"

4:00 pm. Discussion by Jesook Song

4:10 pm. Discussion by Yoonkyung Lee

4:20 pm. Authors’ response

4: 40 pm. General Q&A

Presenters’ Abstracts & Bios:

Agents and Victims of Korean Nationalism: From History to Politics

By Jungmin Seo

Abstract: The existing literature on Korean nationalism predominantly on the birth and history of nationalism, not on the politics of nationalism. The lack of political analysis of Korean nationalism stems from a rather simple reality: Korean nationalism has been studied by historians as well as anthologists and sociologists but not political scientists who have neglected the dynamic nature of nationalistic discourses in the Korean society. The political studies on Korea have been indifferent to this issue based on a vague assumption that Korean nationalism is an unchanging and fixed element of Korean culture and history while unconsciously accepting the primordialist theories of nationalism. By analyzing the development of Korean nationalism as a discursive field of political struggle, I suggest that modern nationalism, with its requisite reification of the nation as the ultimate object of political loyalty, should be understood as a process of hegemonizing and de-hegemonizing through competition among various political and social agents. It should not be understood as a uni-linear project toward an independent nation state. In other words, even a successful nation state is always subject to re-interpretation of nation-ness through which challenging social forces can de-legitimize the state’s claim as a guardian of the nation. With this theoretical framework, I briefly discuss various social forces such as the Korean state, Korean women, student dissidents, oversea Koreans and migrant workers as agents and victims of Korean nationalism who shaped the forms of political struggles in modern Korean history, and at the same time, whose identities were formed by the discursive struggles of Korean nationalism. In sum, this research is a tentative attempt to construct a theoretical framework to understand the life of nationalism in a well-constructed nationhood.

Jungmin Seo (PhD)is Professor of political science and international studies at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. He taught at the University of Oregon and University of Hawaii before joining Yonsei University in 2010. His teaching and research areas are nationalism, Korean politics, Chinese politics, critical approaches to political science and International Relation theories. He recently published “Nationalism” in Oxford Handbook of Korean Politics (2023), “Koera-Japan relations through thick description: revisiting the national identity formation processes,” Third World Quarterly (forthcoming), “The Emergence and Evolution of Internatioanl Relations Studies in South Korea,” Review of International Studies (2021), and “Introduction: Political Dynamics of Korean Femiism-From #MeToo to Womad,” Journal of Asian Sociology (2020).

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Decolonizing International Relations Studies through Korean Literature

By Young Chul Cho

Abstract: This paper aims to un-suture Westphalian IR common sense from a non-essentialist and situated perspective in South Korea, in the context of decolonising IR. Toward this end, the paper methodologically looks at a South Korean novel, A Grey Man, published in 1963, the time when it was the early postcolonial period of South Korea and at the height of the Cold War. In doing a contrapuntal reading of Westphalian IR via the non-Western novel, the paper also attempts to do a different worlding and conceptualising of the international from the below. This paper mainly addresses the following set of questions. How do yellow negroes (subject race) make sense of themselves, their roles and life-modes in the world defined for them by the white West (master race)? How do yellow negroes understand and reply to the white West who has been hegemonic in world politics and history? What are A Grey Man’s ways of resisting, engaging with, or relating to the hegemonic West who is already internal to himself?

Young Chul Cho (Ph.D. in International Relations) is Professor in the School of International Studies at Jeonbuk National University in Jeonju, South Korea. Before taking up the current position, he taught at O.P. Jindal Global University (India), Leiden University (the Netherlands). He was a visiting scholar at National Taiwan University and National Chengchi University in Taiwan (ROC). His teaching and research interests include International Relations theory, critical geopolitics, non-traditional security studies, East Asian studies, knowledge production and travel, and philosophy. His articles can be found in Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Review of International Studies, International Journal, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Asian Perspective, Korean Observer, and so on.

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Korean Feminism and Backlash politics in South Korea

By Hye Min Ryu

Abstract: This paper aims to provide a new perspective on the current backlash against feminism in South Korea. The Korean society is currently experiencing a strong backlash against feminism. As this anti-feminist tendency has been widely shared by the young Korean men, the tendency became ‘the twenties men phenomenon’ in Korean society. Nevertheless, Korean feminism, which had been understood as an integral part of Korean democracy, looks withering amid the backlash associated with ideologies of ‘fair’ and ‘meritocracy’. Renowned feminist scholars even admitted that Korean feminists have lost the effective feminist language to combat it. In this paper, I argue that the current backlash in South Korea is not regressive to what Korean feminism seemed to achieve since the democratization in 1987 but rather presents new politics in South Korea. This paper concludes that the meaning of ‘progressiveness’ and ‘conservativeness’ in South Korean society could be discussed in the context of the backlash politics.

Hye Min Ryu is a doctoral student in political science at Yonsei University. Her research interests are in critical theory, feminism, and postcolonialism. Hye Min completed her undergraduate degree in East Asian Studies at University of Toronto and master’s degree in Political Science at Yonsei University.

Description

Joshua Pilzer’s book launch, Quietude: A Musical Anthropology of "Korea’s Hiroshima" (Oxford University Press, 2022).

*The presentation of the book will be followed by a reception*

 Book

About the book:

Based on nine years of intermittent fieldwork, Quietude recounts the stories, songs and other arts of survival of Korean atomic bomb survivors and their children in Hapcheon, Korea, offering a corrective to the enduring, multifaceted neglect and marginalization they have faced. Struck by the quiet of many atom bomb victims and their children, many of whom suffer from radiation-related illness and disability, I discuss its many sources: notions of Japanese soft-spokenness, vocal disability, the quiet contemplation of texts, the changes to the human heart as one grows older, the experience of war, social marginalization, traumatic experience, and various social movement discourses. I consider victims’ uses of voice, speech, song, and movement in the struggle for national and global recognition, in the ongoing work of negotiating the traumatic past, and in the effort to consolidate and maintain selves and relationships in the present.

About the author:

Joshua D. Pilzer is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the anthropology of sound and music in modern Korea and Japan, voice studies, and the relationships between music, everyday life, survival, memory, traumatic experience, marginalization, socialization, gendered violence, public culture, mass media, social practice and identity. He is particularly interested in the ethnography of the “everyday,” in the thresholds which link music to other forms of social expression, and in the vistas of ethnomusicology beyond music. His first book, Hearts of Pine, about singing in the lives of Korean survivors of the Japanese “comfort women” system, was published in 2012 by Oxford University Press. He is currently conducting fieldwork for an ethnography of the voice in everyday life in contemporary Japan, focused on the uses of speaking and singing voices in pedagogies of propriety, authority and legitimate violence.