Description

BOOK TALK

Cine-Mobility: Twentieth-Century Transformations in Korea’s Film and Transportation (Harvard University Press, 2022)  

In 1916, a group of Korean farmers and their children gathered to watch a film depicting the enthronement of the Japanese emperor. For this screening, a unit of the colonial government’s news agency brought a projector and generator by train to their remote rural town. Before the formation of commercial moviegoing culture for colonial audiences in rural Korean towns, many films were sent to such towns and villages as propaganda. The colonial authorities, as well as later South Korean postcolonial state authorities, saw film as the most effective medium for disseminating their political messages.

In Cine-Mobility, Han Sang Kim argues that the force of propaganda films in Korea was derived primarily not from their messages but from the new mobility of the viewing position. From the first film shot in Korea in 1901 through early internet screen cultures in late 1990s South Korea, Cine-Mobility explores the association between cinematic media and transportation mobility, not only in diverse and discrete forms such as railroads, motorways, automobiles, automation, and digital technologies, but also in connection with the newly established rules and restrictions and the new culture of mobility, including changes in gender dynamics, that accompanied it.  

Order your copy of the book at: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674267978    

HAN SANG KIM is an associate professor and chair in the Department of Sociology at Ajou University, Suwon, South Korea. His teaching interests include visual sociology, qualitative methods, and sociology of film and media. He has conducted research and written on the themes of film archives, ethics of photographic representation, post/colonial visual culture, and mobilities. His most recent book is Cine-Mobility: Twentieth-Century Transformations in Korea’s Film and Transportation (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022) that traces the association between cinematic visuality and modern transportation mobility in forming a modern subjectivity in twentieth century Korea. He has been concurrently working on his second book project based on his doctoral dissertation on U.S. film propaganda activities towards South Korea from 1945 through 1972, putting on a self-reflexive critique of information-oriented archival approaches to film materials and expanding the project onto a methodological exploration. He has published essays in The Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Korean Studies, Inter-Asian Cultural Studies, and several other journals in Korean. He was the inaugural programmer of the Cinematheque KOFA at the Korean Film Archive in Seoul and taught at UC San Diego, Boston University, and Rice University during his postdoctoral years.  

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Cinema Studies Institute and the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto

Description

ABOUT THE BOOK:  Tastes Like War   

A Korean American daughter’s exploration of food and family history, in order to understand her mother’s schizophrenia. Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details—language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was fifteen, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve for the rest of her life. Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia. In her mother’s final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her mother’s childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother’s multiple voices at the table. And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her—but also the things that kept her alive.   

Grace M. Cho is the author of Tastes Like War (Feminist Press, 2021), a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction and the winner of the 2022 Asian Pacific American Literature Award in adult nonfiction. Her first book, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), received a 2010 book award from the American Sociological Association. Her writings have appeared in journals such as Catapult, The New Inquiry, Poem Memoir Story, Contexts, Gastronomica, Feminist Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Qualitative Inquiry. She is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.   

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies at the Asian Institute, the Department of Sociology, the Women and Gender Studies Institute, the Department of English, and the Centre for the Study of the United States at the Munk School, University of Toronto

Description

This was a community screening of Coming To You 너에게 가는 길  followed by post-screening conversations.

Synopsis:

We are ready to step into your world.  Nabi, a veteran firefighter, prided herself for living a successful life, until one day her child, Hankyeol, comes out to her by saying: “Mom, I want to get a mastectomy.” Meanwhile, Vivian, a flight attendant of 28 years, sheds tears after reading her son, Yejoon’s, letter: “I’m gay.” Nabi and Vivian’d never even heard of the term “LGBTQIA+” during their entire lives when Hankyeol and Yejoon started opening up their various problems. Facing the reality that their children are struggling, what would two mothers do?   

The post-screening conversations featured Sujin Choi (WIND), Minwoo Jung (Loyola), Hyun-Chul Kim & Samuel Yoon (U of Toronto).  

Hosted by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Mark S. Bonham Centre for the Sexual Diversity Studies, the Women and Gender Studies Institute, and the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, the Academy of Korean Studies, York University’s Korean Office for Research and Education, and WIND, Toronto Korean Feminist Collective.   

Information about the documentary: Coming To You 너에게 가는 길   

Director and Writer: BYUN Gyuri  Cast: Nabi, Vivian

Executive Producer: PINKS

Producers Sona JO, LEE Hyuk-sang

Production: South Korea 2021

Running time: 93 min (post-screening conversations will follow screening)

Audio: Korean (English subtitles)

Post-screening panelists:

Sujin Choi is a member of WIND (Toronto Korean Feminist Collective), and a founding member of Jogakbo (transgender rights organization) and Rainbow Foundation in South Korea. She also performed as a singer on the 2016 Seoul Pride stage.  

Minwoo Jung is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies and Gender Studies at Loyola University Chicago. His research investigates the impacts of global and regional geopolitics on political, economic, and social life of marginalized groups and individuals. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork conducted across East and Southeast Asia, he is working on a book project that presents a comparative ethnography of the intimate entanglements of queer lives and geopolitics.   

Hyun-Chul Kim is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Geography & Planning at the University of Toronto. She earned her MA degree in Geography from Seoul National University with the analysis of spatial occupation and contestation of the publicness between LGBTQI+ allies and anti-queer coalitions in the 2014 Seoul and Daegu Queer Parade in South Korea. Her doctoral project centers on rural villages as the intermediate locus of leprosy control in South Korea after the Korean War to engage in a deeper analysis of “the carceral” in the broader Asian context from the ruins of war, the discontinuity and continuity of the colonial past, as well as dreams of reconstructing nations via small community and rural reforms.   

Samuel Yoon (He/Him) is a PhD student in Women and Gender studies at the University of Toronto. His research is on queer performance, violence, and Asian racialization. In his spare time, he is an active participant and performer in queer of colour spaces in Toronto. Prior to his graduate studies he worked at an HIV/AIDS service organization as a project lead on LGBTQ+ inclusion.