Vortragsreihe der Koreanistik
| April 17 | (Sogang University) | Postcolonial Reflections on the Global Memory Formation: Holocaust, Stalinist Crime and Colonial Genocide |
| June 5 | (York University) | A Sublime Disaster: The Sewol Ferry Incident and the Politics of the Living Dead |
| June 19 | Hyang Jin Jung (Seoul National University) | Intimate sociability in inter-Korean encounters: North Korean refugees, South Koreans, and the matters of maum and jeong |
| June 26 | Bonnie Tilland (Leiden University) | Peace, Love and 'Understanding Korean Society': The Collision of Hard and Soft Power in the KIIP (Korean Immigration and Integration Program) |
July 17 Alte Aula, 16:00-19:30 | Sung Un Gang (Technische Universität Berlin) Jung CHEN (University of Cambridge) Minwoo Jung (Loyola University Chicago) | Queering Asia: Doing Field Research on Lives in the South Korean and Taiwanese Queer Community |
| July 24 | Yuhee Park (Korea University) | The Simultaneous Transformations of Korean Film Genre and Society |
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Hyun Ok Park (York University, Canada)
A Sublime Disaster: Antifascism and its Commune Form in Sewol Square
Wed. June 5th, 18:00 c.t., Wilhelmstraße 133, Room 30
Abstract
This presentation scrutinizes the contemporary political milieu of South Korea through the lens of fascism and antifascism, focusing on the seven-year-long encampment protest at Kwanghwamun Plaza following the Sewŏl disaster. Recent scholarship reconceptualizes fascism as a “process” rather than a discrete event (mass movement, regime type, charismatic leadership), highlighting three key processes: the appeal to national unity grounded in claims of ancient and racialized origins, the unmediated identification with the state, and commodity fetishism. In this talk, I discern these fascist tendencies in the entrenched political polarization and the recurrent candlelight protests since the 2000s in South Korea. Drawing on my ethnographic research, I investigate how the commune form of the Sewŏl encampment challenges these tendencies with its politics akin to Deleuze’s “minoritarian politics.”
Bio
Hyun Ok Park is a professor of sociology at York University, Canada. With archival and ethnographic research, she investigates global capitalism in colonial, industrial, and financial forms, democracy, socialism, and post-socialist transition. She is the author of two books: Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Duke University Press, 2005); The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea (Columbia University Press, 2015, Korean translation in 2023). She is completing a book manuscript, “A Sublime Disaster: The Sewŏl Ferry Incident and the Politics of the Living Dead.” Her research has been supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Academy of Korean Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She was the founding Director of the Korean Office for Research and Education at York University. Prof. Dr. Park serves on the editorial boards of Global Perspectives and Economy and Society.
Prof. Dr. Jie-Hyun Lim (Sogang University)
Postcolonial Reflections on the Global Memory Formation: Holocaust, Stalinist Crime and Colonial Genocide
Wednesday April 17th, 18:00 c.t ., Wilhelmstraße 133, Room 30
Bio
Jie Hyun Lim holds the CIPSH chair of Global Easts and is the founding director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University, Seoul. He has published widely on nationalism and Marxism in comparison, Polish history, transnational history and global memory. He is the principal investigator of the research projects of Mnemonic Solidarity: Colonialism, War, and Genocide in the Global Memory Space (2017-2024) and Series Editor of "Entangled Memories in the Global South" at Palgrave/Macmillan and "Global Easts" at the Central European University Press. His recent books include Victimhood Nationalism-Global History and Memory (Columbia Univ Press, 2024, forthcoming), Opfernationalismus. Erinnerung und Herrschaft in der postkolonialen Welt (Klaus Wagenbach 2024), Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Practicing (Columbia Univ Press, 2022), and Mnemonic Solidarity-Global Interventions (Palgave, 2021 co-edited with Eve Rosenhaft).
Abstract
Victimhood nationalism, in my definition, is a narrative template to grant posthumously the moral superiority, historical legitimacy, and political alibis to a present nation living in a legacy of hereditary victimhood by connecting the postmemory generations to ancestral victims via collective memory In this talk, I will articulate victimhood nationalism as a global phenomenon to explain the victimhood competition in the postwar coming to terms with the past in the global memory space across Europe and East Asia In the age of global memory, the spatial turn of globalization reconfigured the national mnemoscape dramatically into the global one With the emergence of the human rights regime as a global memory formation, nationalist discourses have shifted from heroes to victims, which intensified globally the nationalist competition over who suffered most. The dialectical interplay of global and national memories in constructing victimhood nationalism demands a critical inquiry into the dichotomy of perpetrators vs victims, collective guilt vs innocence, national vs cosmopolitan memory, historical actors vs passive objects, over contextualization vs de-contextualization, historical conformism vs presentism, etc. I will investigate the entangled memories of victimhood nationalism in the global memory space focusing on the mnemonic nexus of Poland, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Korea.