Friday, November 30 (4:00 p.m.)
On Being Normal: Madness and the Politics of Care in Colonial Korea
Jun Yoo (University of Hawaii at Manoa)
Location: IEAS Conference Room
Summary: This talk examines the social pathology of mental illness under Japanese colonial rule and how madness became an object of medical discourse and a privileged site for constructing normality. In contrast to the earlier periods, colonial authorities resorted to modern forms of surveillance (what Michel Foucault terms “bio-power”) as it took a great interest in the regulation of public health. In part, this was achieved by the utilization of “specialists” (from economists to psychiatrists, demographers to medical doctors) to conduct studies about the life processes of the Korean people. For the first time, surveys and studies of Korean mental health, crime, genetic illnesses, and other topics proliferated in both the private and state sectors. In particular, it will analyze the emergence of three discursive sites (e.g., medicine, psychiatry, and criminology)—and their corresponding institutions (e.g., hospital, asylum, and prison) and how these new apparatuses of power sought to manage the subject population through means of normalization and social control. It will probe the emerging field of psychiatry and how it deployed gender categories to frame and quantify new social pathologies like the hysteric (a female malady), recidivist, imbecile, and the likes. One of the central aims is to analyze the moral connotations attached to these new diagnostic labels and the processes by which standards of normativity were framed in the Korean context. Likewise, it seeks to understand the changing socio-economic conditions that contributed to the rise of these statistics.
<< Spring 2013 Events | All Event Lists | Spring 2012 Events >>
Index
11/30 | On Being Normal: Madness and the Politics of Care in Colonial Korea - Jun Yoo
11/9 | Flesh as Burden in the Prison Letters of Lutgarde Yi Suni (1782-1801) - Deberniere Torrey
11/8 | Hollywood Movies and the Gender Discourse in Colonial Korea - Yumi Moon
10/30 | Lay Monk Villages Near Korea's Northernmost Border, 1600s to 1960s - Hwansoo Kim
10/19 | Korean Migrants, Confused Identities, and Passports in the Russian Far East, 1880-1910 - Alyssa Park
10/12 | U.S.-South Korean Relations in the 'Pacific Century' - Kathleen Stephens
10/9 | Kizil to Koguryo: the Multi-cultural World of Han Architecture - Nancy Steinhardt
10/5 | Fresh Archeological Insights into the Ancient Korean Past - Various
9/28 | Bargaining with Kinship: Chosonjok Migrant Mothers in the Age of Korea Wind - Caren Freeman
9/19 | Scarred Heritage: Achieving Peace and Reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula - Various
9/17 | Ghosts of Premodern Korea: Haunting and Balancing the Cosmos - Michael Pettid
9/6 | Crisis over North Korea’s Nukes: Opportunities for Northeast Asia’s Peace? - Jae-Jung Suh
Friday, November 9 (4:00 p.m.)
A Martyr’s Grievance: Flesh as Burden in the Prison Letters of Lutgarde Yi Suni (1782-1801)
Deberniere Torrey (University of Utah)
Location: IEAS Conference Room
Summary: In 1801, hundreds of Korean Catholics were executed for engaging in religious activity not sanctioned by the Chosŏn state. Yi Suni, a young female Catholic awaiting execution, wrote two letters from prison. These letters reveal Yi’s identity as positioned between Korean tradition and the Catholic worldview. Yi’s letters articulate the standard modes of formality, advice-giving, and filial piety typical of women’s writing in late Chosŏn Korea, while also revealing that her Catholic identity allows her to transcend certain gender-based boundaries. Yet this new identity brings its own burden. When Yi’s letters are examined against the motif of han (suffering, grievance) characterizing a subgenre of Chosŏn women’s writing, we find that the new burden remains subtextualized rather than articulated. This qualifies the common perception that Catholicism was a liberating force for late Chosŏn women. At the same time, Yi’s new identity, even with its unacknowledged burden, gives her a uniquely self-conscious voice.
Thursday, November 8 (4:00 p.m.)
Hollywood Movies and the Gender Discourse in Colonial Korea
Yumi Moon (Stanford University)
Location: IEAS Conference Room
Summary: U.S. films were the major medium through which Koreans perceived America during Japanese colonial rule (1910–45). In the past few decades, the paradigm of “colonial modernity” has provided a dominant frame within which to interpret Korea’s transformation under Japan’s colonial rule. Does this concept offer a relevant framework for characterizing cultural and ideological changes that occurred in colonial Korea? Yumi Moon investigates the popularity of American movies during wartime colonial Korea (1931–45) and the different reception of American movies by Korean versus Japanese consumers. She surveys the articles on movies and gender in Chosôn Ilbo, the Korean daily newspaper, and Keijō Nippo, the major newspaper for Japanese settlers, and traces the influence of American films on the gender discourse in colonial Korea. Through this survey, she suggests that the Korean discourse of “New Women,” the epitome of modernity in colonial Korea, had separate origins from the Japanese settler discourse of women.
Tuesday, October 30 (4:00 p.m.)
The Realm of Obscurity: Lay Monk Villages (ChaegasAng Parak) Near Korea's Northernmost Border, 1600s to 1960s
Hwansoo Kim (Duke University)
Location: IEAS Conference Room
Friday, October 19 (4:00 p.m.)
A Contested Borderland: Korean Migrants, Confused Identities, and Passports in the Russian Far East, 1880-1910
Alyssa Park (University of Iowa)
Location: IEAS Conference Room
Summary: This talk addresses the jurisdictional contests over Koreans in the Russian Far East at the turn of the 20th century. After the Russians acquired a new boundary with Korea in 1860, the former military buffer zone was transformed into a porous borderland where disparate peoples, economies, and ideas coexisted and contended with each other. Thousands of Koreans migrated to the Russian Far East and became one of the largest ethnic groups there. Their movement spurred a flurry of debates between border officials of Chosôn Korea and Russia about the ambiguous subjecthood of Koreans abroad. This talk examines local debates about the legal status of Koreans by situating them within global context of “hardening” national borders, prevalence of passports, and discourse about aliens and subjects.
Friday, October 12 (4:00 p.m.)
U.S.-South Korean Relations in the 'Pacific Century'
Kathleen Stephens (Former U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea)
Location: UC Berkeley Alumni House
Summary: President Obama has declared U.S.-South Korean relations “stronger than ever,” and opinion polls in both countries show broad public agreement that this is the case. This presentation will suggest factors that explain this much strengthened relationship, and discuss challenges both countries face in the region and beyond. As a Peace Corps volunteer in South Korea in the 1970s, a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul in the 1980s, and returning as U.S. Ambassador to Korea, Foreign Service officer Kathleen Stephens saw firsthand South Korea’s extraordinary economic development, its tumultuous but successful democratization, and its rise to a position of substantial regional and global influence. Ambassador Stephens will describe South Korea’s journey, and reflect on U.S.-Korean relations over the years. She will also discuss U.S. policy toward North Korea.
Tuesday, October 9 (4:00 p.m.)
Kizil to Koguryo: the Multi-cultural World of Han Architecture
Nancy Steinhardt (University of Pennsylvania)
Location: IEAS Conference Room
Friday, October 5 (4:00 p.m.)
Fresh Archeological Insights into the Ancient Korean Past
Location: Berkeley City Club
Speakers:
Jonathan Best (Wesleyan University)
Mark Byington (Harvard University)
Jack Davey (UCLA)
Martin Bale (Harvard University)
Friday, September 28 (4:00 p.m.)
Bargaining with Kinship: Chosonjok Migrant Mothers in the Age of Korea Wind
Caren Freeman (University of Virginia)
Location: IEAS Conference Room
Summary: The large-scale influx of Korean Chinese (or Chosonjok) migrants from northeastern China into South Korea in the last decades of the twentieth century conjures up images of formerly impassable Cold War borders suddenly rendered passable. Yet Chosonjok opportunities for mobility at this historical juncture were largely created by the migrants themselves and at great cost to their families and communities in northeastern China. Chosǒnjok mothers in particular became experts in manipulating the kinship categories sanctioned by South Korea’s restrictive immigration laws. Arranging a “fake marriage” to a South Korean man, traveling in the guise of the mother of a married-out bride, and posing as a “separated family member” (isan kajok) in search of long-lost kin were all common ways of exploiting South Korea’s kin-based policies. While effective in circumventing the law, these acts of “faking kinship” generated a unique set of legal, moral and cultural dilemmas for migrant women and their family members. I will explore these dilemmas and chart the emergence of a new morality whereby kinship identities and relationships had become bargaining chips in a high-risk game of transnational mobility.
Wednesday, September 19 (2:00 p.m.)
Scarred Heritage: Achieving Peace and Reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula
Location: IEAS Conference Room
Speakers and Topics:
Bruce Cumings (University of Chicago)
A Reexamination of Kim Daejung's Sunshine Policy and Its Aftermath
Philip Yun (Ploughshares Fund)
North Korea's Diplomatic and Security Strategy
David Kang (University of Southern California)
Explaining China's Seemingly Irrational Support of North Korea
David Straub (Stanford University)
A Principal Approach: U.S. Policy Toward the Korean Peninsula
Victor Cha (Georgetown University)
Korea and the Next Administration
Monday, September 17 (4:00 p.m.)
Ghosts of Premodern Korea: Haunting and Balancing the Cosmos
Michael Pettid (Binghamton University)
Location: IEAS Conference Room
Summary: There are numerous accounts in the literature of the Koryŏ and early Chosŏn periods in Korea that feature encounters with ghosts or beings from beyond the human world. While these accounts can be sometimes humorous or frightening, a more important value is the insight they offer into the way that the peoples of these times understood death and the afterlife. Narratives of ghosts can range from didactic tales that aim at altering the lifestyles of the living to those accounts that reveal social fears such as the retaliation of one who wrongly died. This talk will use period accounts from Koryŏ and early Chosŏn to examine how death was understood. This study will thus bring into relief the understandings of these peoples concerning death and the afterlife, and how this was reflected in the lives of the living.
Thursday, September 6 (4:00 p.m.)
Crisis over North Korea’s Nukes: Opportunities for Northeast Asia’s Peace?
Jae-Jung Suh (Johns Hopkins University)
Location: IEAS Conference Room