CKS Fall 2018 Events
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Index
11/29 | Critical Auralities: The Korean War & the Praxis of Listening - Crystal Baik
11/15 | Is there a light at the end of the North Korean nuclear tunnel? - Siegfried Hecker
11/5 | Southeast Asia and South Korea’s Nascent Construction Industry - John P. DiMoia
10/18 | Coping with Backlash Against Globalization: National and Firm Strategies - Various
10/15 | A Paradigm Shift: A Possible North Korean State and Reverse Kissinger Strategy - Youngjun Kim
9/13 | The Subaltern Cosmopolitanism: "Koryo" Cinema of Disaspora Archive and Exile Trilogy - Soyoung Kim
9/12 | Special Academic Preview Film Screening: Goodbye My Love, North Korea - Soyoung Kim
9/5 | Book Talk: Farewell, Circus - Woon-Yeong Cheon, Jinim Park
Thursday, November 29 (4:00 p.m.)
Critical Auralities: The Korean War & the Praxis of Listening
Crystal Baik (University of California, Riverside)
Location: Room 180, Doe Library, UC Berkeley
Summary: Drawing from a chapter of her forthcoming book, Reencounters: On the Korean War & Diasporic Memory Critique, Professor Baik discusses a diasporic repertoire of multigenerational oral history archives that have coalesced in the past twenty years in relation to the un-ended Korean War. Centering the critical feminist praxis of embodied listening through rather than in spite of difference, Professor Baik considers what it means to mobilize an oral— or more precisely, aural— methodology to trouble and expand how we sense, hear, and remember war. Namely, Professor Baik’s talk examines how aural history projects reframe the Korean War’s pervasive effects from individuated traumatic imprints to historical and social formations indicative of contemporary life. Placing pressure on the aural dimensions of narrative-and-listening practices, she also considers how mnemonic silences, as feminist oral historian Luisa Passerini puts it, are “connected with remembering, not with forgetting.”
Bio: Crystal Mun-hye Baik is Assistant Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies at UC Riverside. Existing at the crossroads of Transnational American Studies, diasporic feminist studies, visual culture studies and oral history methodology, Professor Baik’s forthcoming book, Reencounters: On the Korean War & Diasporic Memory Critique (Temple University Press) draws on a selection of diasporic cultural memory practices to track the conflicting meanings of “true justice” in relation to American militarized presence in Korea and the North Pacific. Currently, she is working on two new projects, including an oral history archive that focuses on Korean diasporic feminist and queer activists and cultural workers in the Americas, as well as a research project that addresses the ethnologist imagining of “Korea” as evidenced through early institutional collections.
Monday, November 5 (12:00 p.m.)
Investigating “Security Roads”: Southeast Asia (Thailand, South Vietnam) and South Korea’s Nascent Construction Industry, 1954-1973
John P. DiMoia (Seoul National University)
Location: Room 180, Doe Library, UC Berkeley
Summary: This talk considers South Korea’s relationship to Southeast Asia through the pair of Thailand and South Vietnam, looking at the “new” relationships formed in the aftermath of the Korean War. With diplomatic ties restored in the mid to late 1950s, the ROK began to make inquiries while pursuing infrastructure projects, often connecting with the same pool of international contractors who had previously assisted with post-Korean War recovery. Hyundai attempted to intervene in the Thai northeast in the early 1960s with the building of Thai airfields. For Vietnam, the context would subsequently become famous as the site for numerous Korean projects, with the first civic actions dating to late 1964. This talk takes up the conjoined questions of technical aid / learning, recognizing here a shared economic community, with common defense interests. The learning experience, especially that taking place in Thailand, is often neglected as a basis for South Korea’s skill acquisition and the formation of its early developmental impulses.
Thursday, October 18 (9:00 a.m.)
Coping with Backlash Against Globalization: National and Firm Strategies
Location: Room 180, Doe Library, UC Berkeley
Co-Sponsor/s: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), Mr. & Mrs. S.H. Wong Center for the Study of Multinational Corporations, Berkeley APEC Study Center (BASC), Center for Long-term Cyber Security, MSI Global, The Clausen Center, Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies
Speakers:
Vinod Aggarwal
Anders Ahnlid
Edward Alden
Naazneen Barma
Jean-Marc Blanchard
Louis Brennan
Min-hua Chiang
Greg Corning
Nils Gilman
Vijay Kaul
Simon Lacey
Seungjoo Lee
Seung-Yoon Oh
Naubahar Sharif
Harsha Singh
Charlotte Stanton
Alastair Thornton
Anurag Varma
Steve Vogel
Steve Weber
Suisheng Zhao
Monday, October 15 (4:00 p.m.)
A Paradigm Shift: A Possible North Korean State and Reverse Kissinger Strategy
Youngjun Kim (Korea National Defense University)
Location: Room 180, Doe Library, UC Berkeley
Co-Sponsor/s: Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in San Francisco
Summary: The situation of the Korean Peninsula has rapidly changed over the last few months. U.S. President Trump, ROK President Moon and Chairman Kim of North Korea agreed on peace and denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Not surprisingly, many people and experts all over the world still have skeptical views on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Professor Youngjun Kim will provide a new interpretation on today’s Korean Peninsula issue by explaining forgotten and ignored stories of North Korean history and North Korean ordinary people. Professor Kim argues that it is time to change a totalitarian school of North Korea (a stereotype on 1%-99% North Korean society) and a myth on China-North Korean relations. In this historical and political context, motivations and strategic objectives of the Chairman Kim Jong Un are mainly two factors: Firstly, Kim wants his long-term political survival by strengthening a wide political support from North Korean middle class like his grandfather’s political strategy in the late 1940’s and 1950’s. Secondly, Kim wants to be politically, economically and psychologically independent from China. It was not only hopes of political leaders, his grandfather and father, but also ones of North Korean ordinary people. President Trump intentionally or unintentionally would benefit from this situation by conducting a so-called “reverse Kissinger’s strategy”. Today’s Korean Peninsula situation would be a greater strategic choice for all players than wait-and-see sanctions-collapse theory and bloody nose attacks.
Thursday, September 13 (4:00 p.m.)
The Subaltern Cosmopolitanism: "Koryo" Cinema of Disaspora Archive and Exile Trilogy
Soyoung Kim (Korea National University of Arts)
Location: Room 180, Doe Library, UC Berkeley
Summary: The "Koryo" Cinema is a series of films produced by directors of Koryo people (ethnic Koreans in Central Asia and Russia). It, however, goes beyond a specific Korea diaspora as the significant parts of the films are made collectively with other ethnic minorities and Russians in the former Soviet Union and present Central Asia. Koryo cinema addresses the urgent issues of language, religion, and ecology as well as ethnicity. As such, it is a cinema of affiliation pointing to the subaltern cosmopolitanism, almost an accidental emergence against and vis-à-vis the Soviet Internationalism and Nomadism of Kazakhstan and Koryo diaspora's historically embodied sense of in/between (間). Exile Trilogy (2014-2018, dir. Soyoung Kim) both as an archival documentary as well as a critical inquiry engages with tracing the trajectory of “Koryo” people and cultural production of cinema through the prism of subaltern cosmopolitanism.
Bio: Soyoung Kim is one of South Korea’s most prominent and acclaimed independent documentary filmmakers. Directing under the name Jeong Kim, she is well known for her “Women’s History Trilogy” which was made between 2000–04 and examines the varied experiences of Korean women in the country’s turbulent history. She has recently completed her “Exile Trilogy” about the Korean diaspora in central Asia and Russia, of which Goodbye My Love, North Korea is the final film. Soyoung Kim is a professor of cinema studies at the Korea National University of Arts in Seoul and Director of the Trans-Asia Screen Culture Institute.
Wednesday, September 12 (3:00 p.m.)
Special Academic Preview Film Screening: Goodbye My Love, North Korea
Soyoung Kim (Korea National University of Arts)
Location: Room 180, Doe Library, UC Berkeley
Screening Details: Kim Soyoung, 2017, 89 min, South Korea, Korean w/ English subtitles, Color, Digital
Summary: "Goodbye My Love North Korea" looks back on the lives of 8 young North Koreans who went to study at the Moscow Film School in Russia right after the Korean War. In Moscow, they named themselves the '8 Squad' and formed a deep and lasting friendship. By 1958, they had become political exiles after denouncing Kim Il-sung and sought political asylum. As the group became a kind of mini-diaspora across several Eurasian countries, they made their own mission statement and kept active in their own fields of film, novels, and the press. Interviews of survivors, sentences from novels and letters from their homes demonstrate their political conviction, passion towards art, and also a longing for their home. Even though they had to live apart from their families as a diaspora, they are fortunate to have each other.