| DATE: | Friday, October 1, 2004 |
|---|---|
| TIME: | 4:00 p.m. |
| PLACE: | IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton St., 6th Floor |
| FORMAT: | Panel Presentations and a Discussion |
| SPONSOR: | Center for Korean Studies |
Jiwon Shin, Moderator (East Asian Languages and Cultures, U.C. Berkeley)
Scott Swaner (University of Washington, Seattle)
In keeping with Hegel's observation that "Art liberates the real import of appearances from the semblance and the deception of this bad and fleeting world, and imparts to phenomenal semblances a higher reality, born of mind," the poet Kim Suyông works strategically through metonym and parody to counter the deceptions of empire in post-war Korea. Put otherwise, he politicizes the aesthetic. Breaking new poetic ground through the 1950s and 1960s, all the while developing an (anti-)aesthetic Korean modernism based on local and contextual Korean concerns, Kim employs the master's tools in works such as 'Helicopter [Helik'ôp't'ô]" (1955) and "Huge Roots [Kôdaehan ppuri]" (1964) to reorient racist paradigms of oppression in postcolonial society. This essay explores how, by reorienting his philosophy of history, derived from his own subject position vis-à-vis the object of his desire — a Korea free from both imperial and dictatorial designs — Kim offers a poetic critique of Western Orientalism, firmly establishes a kind of Korean literary modernity through performative practice, and offers a tentative cognitive roadmap for moving into Korea's future.
Theodore Hughes (Columbia University)
Ch'oe In-hun's The Tempest (T'aep'ung, 1973) is an early postcolonial reading of Shakespeare's play — it is also the only full-length South Korean novel to address the late colonial period policy of assimilation and the mobilization of Koreans to fight as soldiers in the Japanese Imperial Army in Southeast Asia. In this paper, I consider the ways in which The Tempest offers a reworked pan-Asianism as a postcolonial alternative to Korean, Japanese, and Western history. The text's production of a non-aligned communality in Southeast Asia dismantles both Western and Japanese imperialisms and contests the trajectory of South Korea's statist modernization; The Tempest rejects both the assimilationism deployed by Japan in its war in Asia and the incorporation of South Korea, at the expense of Vietnam, into a U.S.-led developmental modernity. The Tempest follows Ch'oe's Voice of the Governor-General (Ch'ongdok ûi sori, published in four installments, one in 1967, two in 1968, and one much later in 1976), as an intervention in a South Korean discourse on collaboration that can be described, for the most part, as denunciatory, focusing on the individual acts and literary works of "pro-Japanese" writers. If Voice of the Governor-General delegitimizes the deployment of ethnonationalism in South Korea as reproducing earlier imperialist imaginings, The Tempest unpacks the structure of identification, questioning the ways in which postliberation collaboration narratives naturalize the ethnonational subject by figuring imperialization as performance (not performative). The rejection in The Tempest both of colonialism and a reactive, ethnonationalized space does not mean a dismissal of the issue of North/South reunification, Ch'oe In-hun's central concern throughout his work. It is the figuring of "Aisenodin" (Indonesia) as neutral space — a turn less to Césaire's Caliban or Shakespeare's Prospero than to Gonzalo's vision of an egalitarian commonwealth of natural abundance — that informs Ch'oe's alternative modernity, one in which proper nouns are scrambled, losing their authority to organize and enforce ethnonational identities. In The Tempest, the reunification of "Aerokû" (Korea) occurs as an effect of the text's imagining of this alternative, decolonized global history.
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Sponsored by a Grant from the Korea Foundation
