Description

Abstract:

Drawing on the research monograph Diasporic Hallyu: The Korean Wave in Korean Canadian Youth Culture (Yoon, 2022), this talk explored how young people of Korean heritage in Canada engage with the transnational circulation of Korean media and popular culture, known as Hallyu or the Korean Wave. By addressing the diasporic young people’s transnational media practices, this audience research examined an emerging cultural space where multiple identity positions and long-distance nationalism are articulated. The talk proposed an understanding of Hallyu from a diasporic perspective while suggesting a rethinking of transnational media flows beyond a nation-statist perspective.    

Speaker Bio:

Kyong Yoon is a UBC Okanagan Principal’s Research Chair in Trans-Pacific Digital Platform Studies. As a Korean-born settler scholar of colour in Canada, Yoon has studied young people of Asian heritage and their engagement with ethnic and diasporic media. Drawing on ethnographic and critical analyses of diasporic Asian youth’s media practices, he has explored Korean Canadian communities in relation to the recent transnational circulation of Korean media and popular culture.

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At 6:34pm on October 29, 2022, the first of many emergency calls was made from Itaewon. None of these calls for help could stop the loss of 156 lives that night. Even though we study contemporary South Korean politics and society, we struggle to find words to describe this senseless tragedy. We thus come together to mourn and find meaningful ways to respond. We invite others to share our questions and grief too, as we honor the dreams and futures lost.

Description

This online event brought together six of the translators who worked on The Age of Doubt (Honford Star, 2022), a recently-published collection of stories by the formidable Korean author Pak Kyongni (박경리, 1926-2008). As a truly global group of writers tasked with working to bring one Korean author’s fiction into English, their insights into their process and experiences of translating for this book provided a window onto current practices, concerns, challenges and joys in the field of Korean to English literary translation.    

The speakers were joined by three discussants from the University of Toronto community.

About the book:

Published in September 2022, The Age of Doubt includes seven stories by Pak Kyongni written between 1955 and 1968, which marks the period from her literary debut to the publication of the first volume of her epic magnum opus, Toji (1969-1994). The book also includes a commentary, written by Kang Ji Hee, on Pak Kyongni’s life and work with a focus on the stories in the collection. Honford Star are UK-based publishers of classic and contemporary literature from East Asia. This year one of their titles, Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny in translation by Anton Hur (one of our speakers!), was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. True to their mission of working with talented translators and exciting local artists, The Age of Doubt showcases work by eight different translators and cover illustration by Sanho @sanhomaydraw.   

Participants Bios:

You Jeong Kim is a translator and editor based in Seoul. She won the commendation prize of the 47th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards in 2016. She’s also a graduate of LTI Korea Translation Academy Special and Regular Courses. She mainly translates/edits literary and media content including children’s stories, scenarios, pansori, and subtitles.  

Paige Aniyah Morris is a writer and translator from Jersey City, New Jersey. She holds Bas in Ethnic Studies and Literary Arts from Brown University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Newark. The recipient of awards from the Daesan Foundation, the American Literary Translators Association, and the Fulbright Program, her translations from Korean have appeared in Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, Samovar, The Georgia Review, and more.  

Dasom Yang is a writer and translator from Korea living in Berlin. Her translation of Pak Kyongni’s short story "The Age of Darkness" appears in The Age of Doubt (Honford Star, 2022). She is working on a book of essays on love, language, migration and memory. Read more about her work here: http://dasomyang.com.   

Anton Hur was double-longlisted and shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize for his work as a literary translator. A graduate of Korea University College of Law and Seoul National University Graduate School, he currently divides his time between Seoul and Songdo. He will publish a book on translation in Korea in 2023.

Mattho Mandersloot is an Amsterdam-born literary translator, currently based in Jacksonville, Florida. A former full-time taekwondo athlete, he studied Classics (BA), Translation (MA) and Korean Studies (MSt) in London and Oxford. He translates from Korean into English as well as Dutch and his translations include works by bestselling authors such as Sun-mi Hwang and Sang Young Park.  

Sophie Bowman is a PhD student at the University of Toronto, researching post-war Korean fiction by women authors. Her translations include Kim Bo-Young’s I’m Waiting for You: And Other Stories (co-translated with Sung Ryu) and Heena Baek’s Magic Candies (Amazon Crossing Kids). Her short story translations have appeared in Future Science Fiction, Guernica, Clarkesworld and more.   

Aliju Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation examines Decadence as an aesthetic mode in literary narratives that relate to discourses of modernity and modernization, empire, and capitalist expansion. Her other interests include memory, space-time, and family sagas.

Jessica Morgan-Brown is a third-year doctoral student in East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her current research involves an interdisciplinary approach to vernacularization movements in colonial Korea, with a focus on erasures of gender, race, and class inherent in dominant Hangeul narratives.   

Emily Wong is a first-year Master of Information student at the University of Toronto with a concentration in UX-Design. She did her undergraduate studies at the University of Hong Kong majoring in English and Korean Studies. Her training in literary analysis during her days at university made her realise the significance of literature and she started to appreciate the way it both shapes and is shaped by the socio-historical context of the time it is being written.  Organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea. Co-sponsored by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, and the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto.

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*No registration required*

The Centre for the Study of Korea, University of Toronto and the Korean Office for Research and Education, York University in partnership with OCADU University’s Art & Social Change, Faculty of Art presents:

COMFORT

a documentary by Emmanuel Moonchil Park.

 "COMFORT 보드랍게" (2020), tells the life story of KIM Soonak, a survivor of the "comfort women system" and so much more. After the war, she engaged in the US military camptown sex trade, and also worked as a maid. Weaving interviews of activists, archive footage, animation, and the recital of testimonies, the film reconstructs the life stories of the late KIM Soonak. It won the Documentary Award at the 2020 Jeonju International Film Festival and the Beautiful New Docs Award at the 2020 DMZ International Documentary Film Festival.

Emmanuel Moonchil Park is a filmmaker based in Daegu, South Korea. His films over the last decade have offered insightful and nuanced social commentaries on gender and activism. His first feature, MY PLACE (2013), tells the story of his sister’s single motherhood and his family’s reverse migration from Canada to Korea. It screened at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in 2014 and has won multiple awards including the Jury Award at the Seoul Independent Film Festival. BLUE BUTTERFLY EFFECT (2017), traces the anti-THAAD peace movement in Seongju, where local residents and activists organized a fierce opposition to the US military’s installation of an anti-ballistic missile defense system. It won the Best Documentary award at the 2017 Jeonju International Film Festival. QUEER053 (2019) tells the remarkable story of how Daegu, a notoriously conservative city, became the site of an annual queer culture festival second only to Seoul.

This is the first event in a programme series connected to the exhibition of The Statue of the Girl of Peace at OCAD University by the artists Kim Seo-Kyung and Kim Eun-Sung. The statue is a symbol of the flight for justice led by surviving ‘comfort women’ and their allies for redress from the Japanese government.

Friday, January 13, 2023, 7 PM – 9:30 PM
OCAD University, 100 McCaul St., Main Floor Auditorium
Screening, Reception and Post-Screening Talk with the Director

The Statue of the Girl of Peace is on view at OCAD University (100 McCaul Street) in the main lobby from January 5 – April 28, 2023.

The Statue of the Girl of Peace

Oil on fiberglass-reinforced polyester (FRP) and stone powder 160x 180x 125 cm

2017 (The original bronze statue 2011)

On Wednesday, January 8, 1992, thousands of protestors rallied in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, South Korea to demand redress from the Japanese government for the large-scale system of sexual servitude setup and operated by the Japanese Imperial rule during World War II. The Japanese military abducted an estimated 200,000 girls and women from across the Asia-Pacific region who were euphemistically called “comfort women” and forced into sexual slavery. In 2011 the artists installed the bronze ‘Statue of Peace’ in front of the embassy where it remains today. The statue is a powerful symbol of the redress movement, there are version of the statue sited around the world, from Germany to the United States, Australia and Canada.

The Wednesday Demonstrations have turned into a weekly protest in Korea and are led by the remaining survivors. The Statue of the Girl of Peace was created on the occasion of the 1000th protest as a tribute to the spirit and the deep history of the Wednesday Demonstrations, which continue today. The survivors’ ongoing fight for justice is a fight against militarized gender-based sexual violence everywhere.

The empty chair beside the statue is an invitation to you to sit beside the Girl and support the call for redress for the so- called ‘comfort women’. Please take a photo and share it on social media using the hashtags: #statueofpeace #justiceforcomfortwomen