CKS Spring 2021 Events

Thursday, April 15 (4:00 p.m.)
[Online] Buried Ancestors and Lineal Heirs: Disputes over Burial Sites and Lineage Property in Korea during Colonial Transition
Sungyun Lim, University of Colorado, Boulder
Location: Online via Zoom

Summary: Newspapers in colonial Korea from the 1920s and the 1930s are peppered with sensational stories of disputes over burial mountains and lineage property. There seems to have been great anxiety about lineal heirs selling off lineage property where generations of ancestral bones were buried. Many of the disputes landed on the floor of the courts, while some, unfortunately, ended in bloody murders. Those familiar with the history of the previous Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) know that disputes over burial land was quite common; in fact, one of the most common sources of legal disputes in that era. Why is the same pattern of disputes continuing in the colonial period, despite drastic legal changes that the Korean society was undergoing under the colonial rule? In this talk, I will examine legal cases over burial sites and lineage property from the courts of the Korean Empire period (Daehan jeguk, 1897-1910) and the High Court of Colonial Korea (Chōsen kōtō hōin) from the late 1890s into the 1920s, to examine the transformation of rights over burial sites and lineage land.

Bio: Sungyun Lim is associate professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research focuses on the issues of gender, family, law and colonialism in Korea. Her book, Rules of the House: Family Law and Domestic Disputes in Colonial Korea (University of California Press, 2019) examines the formation of small patriarchal family and its impact on women’s legal rights in colonial Korea through civil case records from the High Court of Colonial Korea. She is currently working on two new projects, one on the history of rights over lineage property in colonial Korea and the second one, on the history of domestic adoption in Korea.

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Thursday, April 8 (4:00 p.m.)
Epidemic of Anti-Asian Violence: Connections and Resistance -- Helen Zia in conversation with Leti Volpp
Speaker/s: Helen Zia (Activist), Leti Volpp (UC Berkeley)
Location: Online - Zoom Webinar
Co-Sponsor/s: Center for Race and Gender, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, Asian American & Pacific Islander Standing Committee, Asian American Research Center, Asian Pacific American System-wide Alliance, Division of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, Berkeley Law's Asian Pacific American Law Student Association, Center for Chinese Studies (CCS), Department of Gender and Women's Studies, Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI), OBI Diversity and Health Disparities Cluster, Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, Asian Pacific American Student Development (APASD), People and Culture's Office for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB)

Summary: Almost 40 years ago activist, author, and journalist Helen Zia became the spokesperson for the campaign seeking justice for Vincent Chin, whose racist murder galvanized the Asian American movement.

Join CRG's Director and Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice, Leti Volpp, for a conversation with Helen Zia about the current epidemic of anti-Asian violence, the intersection of white supremacy and misogyny, and how we may resist.

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Wednesday, April 7 (4:00 p.m.)
North Korean Refugee Entrepreneurs in South Korea: Unveiling Korea's Hidden Potential
Kwang Kim, Korea Country Representative, The Asia Foundation
Location: Online Event (via Zoom)
Co-Sponsor/s: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), The Asia Foundation, Berkeley APEC Study Center

Panelist/Discussants: Oassama Hassenein, Distinguished Panelist and Chairman, Rising Tide Fund and Rising Tide Foundation; David Kang, Maria Crutcher Professor in International Relations, Business and East Asian Languages and Cultures | Director, Korean Studies Institute, University of Southern California; Dae Hyun Park, Founder and CEO, Woorion
Moderator: Vinnie Aggarwal, Professor of Political Science, Director, Berkeley APEC Study Center, UC Berkeley

Summary: Seventy-five years after the onset of Asia’s Cold War, the world remains focused on the geopolitics of inter-Korean relations. Meanwhile, an emerging community of more than 33,000 refugees from North Korea currently live in South Korea; half aspire to become entrepreneurs. Despite the potential insight the refugee community could offer, there is insufficient data and limited understanding of their circumstances and specific needs. To fill this gap, The Asia Foundation produced a report on “North Korean Refugee Entrepreneurs in South Korea: Unveiling Korea’s Hidden Potential” to conduct a series of interviews and a landmark survey of 131 refugee entrepreneurs. A download of the report can be found below.

IEAS is glad to co-host with The Asia Foundation this important discussion on the lives of refugee entrepreneurs, exploring their aspirations, experiences, challenges, and opportunities amid discrimination, limited financial access, and barriers in culture and language. Expert panelists will discuss insights from North Korean refugee entrepreneurs and offer a set of strategic recommendations to bolster social inclusion and support refugee entrepreneurs in Korea.

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Thursday, March 18 (7:00 p.m.)
[Online] Empire's Afterlives: Legacies of Militarization and Cultural Politics in Korea
Speaker/s: Eunsong Kim, Northeastern University; E. Tammy Kim, Reporter / Essayist
Location: Online via Zoom
Co-Sponsor/s: Heung Coalition, Nam Center for Korean Studies

Summary: In their article, “Transpacific Entanglements (https://www.academia.edu/34999618/Transpacific_Entanglements),” Yên Lê Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama argue that “U. S. neoliberalism mediates itself through the U. S. national security state, which is simultaneously a racial and a settler state; this is expressed not merely in the racialization of the Asian and Pacific Islander peoples but significantly in the erasure of historical and ongoing settler colonialism and, furthermore, in a racial social order that simultaneously pronounces antiblackness and Islamophobia.” In the case of Korea, such processes are evident in the ongoing division of the peninsula, the presence of U. S. military bases, and the praise for South Korea’s ascendency in the global capitalist order - even as this ascent remains contingent upon exploitation in other countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia.

For this event, we bring together E. Tammy Kim and Eunsong Kim to discuss these “transpacific entanglements” with U. S. neoliberalism, militarization, and racism that South Korea’s own position reveals. What are the legacies of militarism in Korea and how do they impact the everyday lives of Koreans within and outside the peninsula? What does South Korea’s position as a sub-empire reveal about the ways in which ongoing legacies of the Cold War affect the narratives around Asia and Asia America? How do such narratives manifest in the cultural politics of South Korea? How can we form transnational spaces to counter the results and norms of U. S. militarism and work towards building solidarity outside the parameters inscribed by U. S. militarism? Please join us on Thursday, March 18, 2021 at 7pm PST for this important and timely conversation between E. Tammy Kim and Eunsong Kim.

Bio: Eunsong Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and an affiliate faculty of the Department of Cultures, Societies and Global Studies at Northeastern University. Her practice spans: poetry, translation, visual culture and critical race & ethnic studies. Her book project in progress, The Politics of Collecting: Property & Race & Aesthetic Formations considers how legal conceptions of racialized property become foundational to avant-garde and modern understandings of innovation in the arts. Her essays have appeared in: Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, and in the book anthologies, Poetics of Social Engagement and Reading Modernism with Machines. Her poetry has appeared in the Brooklyn Magazine, The Iowa Review, Minnesota Review, and P-Queue amongst others. Her first book of poetry, gospel of regicide, was published by Noemi Press in 2017, and her co-translation (with Sung Gi Kim) of Kim Eon Hee’s poetic text Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days? was published in 2019. She is the recipient of the Ford Foundation Fellowship, a grant from the Andy Warhol Art Writers Program, and Yale’s Poynter Fellowship.

E. Tammy Kim is a freelance reporter and essayist, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and a co-host of the podcast Time to Say Goodbye. In 2016, with Yale Professor Michael Veal, she published Punk Ethnography, a book about the politics of contemporary world music. She writes about the Koreas and labor and public goods in the U.S. for The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New Yorker, and many other outlets, and previously worked at The New Yorkerand Al Jazeera America. Before pursuing a career in journalism, Ms. Kim was a social justice attorney, and she has been active in the U.S. labor movement. She is currently the 2021 James H. Ottaway Sr. visiting professor of journalism at SUNY New Paltz.

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Thursday, March 11 (4:00 p.m.)
[Online] Migrant Conversions: Money, Religion, and Global Projects of Peruvians in South Korea
Erica Vogel, Saddleback College
Location: Online via Zoom

Summary: Peruvian migrant workers began arriving in South Korea in large numbers in the mid-1990s, eventually becoming one of the largest groups of non-Asians in the country. Migrant Conversions shows how despite facing unstable income and legal exclusion, migrants have come to see Korea as an ideal destination, sometimes even as part of their divine destiny. Faced with a forced end to their residence in Korea, Peruvians have developed strategies to transform themselves from economic migrants into heads of successful transnational families, influential church leaders, and cosmopolitan travelers. Set against the backdrop of the 2008 global financial crisis, Migrant Conversions explores the intersections of three types of conversions—monetary, religious, and cosmopolitan—to argue that migrants use conversions to negotiate the meaning of their lives in a constantly changing transnational context. As Peruvians carve out social spaces, they create complex and uneven connections between Peru and Korea that challenge a global hierarchy of nations and migrants. Exploring how migrants, churches, and nations change through processes of conversion reveals how globalization continues to impact people’s lives and ideas about their futures and pasts long after they have stopped moving or after a particular global moment has come to an end.

Bio: Erica Vogel is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, California. She is a cultural anthropologist who conducts fieldwork in South Korea, Peru, and Mexico looking at issues of globalization, migration, religious conversion, and transnational flows between Asia and Latin America. She is the author of Migrant Conversions: Transforming Connections Between Peru and South Korea (UC Press 2020), which was based on 24 months of fieldwork in Peru and South Korea with migrants and their families, their religious leaders, and government officials. Her current project is funded by a grant from Mellon/ACLS and is called “K-Pop in Mexico: Creating and Consuming Globalization through La Ola Coreana.” She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine and held a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.

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Thursday, February 25 (4:00 p.m.)
[Online] Reclaiming Narratives: Writing, Activism, and Translation: A Conversation and Reading with Bora Chung and Anton Hur
Speaker/s: Bora Chung, Author; Anton Hur, Translator
Location: Online via Zoom
Co-Sponsor/s: Heung Coalition, Literature Translation Institute of Korea

Summary: The surge in interest in Korean literature across the world in recent years has been undeniable, along with the fact that women writers have consistently been writing and publishing some of the most prominent and innovative works of literature in contemporary South Korea. Indeed, in 2019, nine out of the ten winners of the Hankook Ilbo Literature Award were women (https://m.hankookilbo.com/News/Read/201911031698786605). Yet this relatively recent success belongs to a longer history of arduous struggles faced by women writing in modern Korea — from the institutional barriers to education (stretching all the way back to the colonial period) and systematic discrimination in publishing industries and prize systems, to labels such as yeoryu munhak (“feminine writing”) that limited the ways in which women’s writings were critically received.

In this sense, writing as a woman in South Korea can be seen as inextricably intertwined with activism. This event seeks to triangulate the relationship between activism, writing, and translating by highlighting the works and themes of author Bora Chung — one of the most exciting emerging authors in South Korea right now. As an activist, translator, and writer of “unrealistic stories” (drawing on horror, science fiction, and fantasy), Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society. Her visceral imagery, striking sentences, and thematic complexity, eloquently and beautifully rendered by Anton Hur in the English, press us to think about the wrongs that are committed right before our very eyes — that the truly terrifying and unreal part about genre fiction is that they are closer to our real lives than we may think.

Bio: Bora Chung (Writer, Translator, and Lecturer at Yonsei University) is a writer of science fiction and generally unrealistic stories. Chung currently teaches Russian language and literature at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea and translates modern literary works from Russian and Polish into Korean. She has published three novels and three books of collected short stories in Korean.

Anton Hur (Writer and Translator) was born in Stockholm, Sweden. He is the winner of a PEN Translates grant, a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, a Daesan Foundation grant, a GKL Korean Literature Translation Award, and multiple LTI Korea and Publication Promotion Agency of Korea grants. His translations include Kyung-Sook Shin’s The Court Dancer (Pegasus Books) and Kang Kyeong-ae’s The Underground Village (Honford Star), as well as stories in Words Without Borders, Asymptote Journal, Slice Magazine, Litro, Anomaly, and others. He has taught at Seoul National University, the Ewha University Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation, Yonsei University, and the Literary Translation Institute of Korea. His translation of Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny (winner of a PEN/HEIM grant) is forthcoming with Honford Star in 2021.

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Thursday, February 11 (4:00 p.m.)
[Online] Korean Women in Classical Music: Moving beyond Traditional Roles and Labels
Yoon Joo Hwang, University of Central Florida
Location: Online via Zoom

Summary: My first visit to Shenzhen, China caused me to rethink my identity and the role of Asian women in classical music. Shortly after becoming the only East Asian female bassoon professor I know of, and perhaps the first anywhere, I journeyed to Shenzhen, China in 2018 to give a master class. Soon after I arrived at the school, a 10 year-old boy came up to me ask, “A woman can play the bassoon?” This question surprised me and caused me to wonder, rhetorically, whether I was suddenly living in the 1970s or 1980s rather than the 2010s. The societal inertia evident in such assumptions, however, also helps to sustain the oft-remarked notion that there are still gender-based affinities for certain instruments, which are especially strong in male-dominated Asian cultures. In Korea, the traditionally higher proportions of men in positions of power strongly influence perceptions of gender roles, and this aspect of gender dynamics remains highly prevalent. Strong and generally conservative notions persist about the role of women in their society as a legacy of Confucianism, which continues to influence cultures in Korea. However, the rise of classical music cultures also has allowed Korean female musicians to assert their voices and express their identity through music performance—in a purely auditory medium, after all, it does not matter whether one is a man or a woman. Although there is still a long way to go before achieving gender equality in Asia, and gender hierarchies persist in societies there, the burgeoning cultural importance of classical music since the 1980s has created a space in which Korean women can assume new, less constrained roles and identities.

Bio: Dr. Yoon Joo Hwang, Assistant Professor of Bassoon at the University of Central Florida, has taught and performed throughout the U.S., Asia and Europe. She has been invited to present master classes and to give lectures at Yonsei University, Hanyang University, Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, Shanghai Orchestra Academy, UCLA, UC Irvine and UC Santa Barbara. Dr. Hwang has a diverse research portfolio and has been invited to present scholarly research papers at meetings of the Association of Asian Studies, the College Music Society and the International Double Reed Society, the Meg Quigley Bassoon Symposium, the National Association of College Wind and Percussion Instructors and the Hawaii University International Conferences on Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences and Education. Her academic article entitled “How Asian Identity Impacts Asian Performers in Classic Music: East Asians Meet Western Musical Culture” was published in the Journal of Ewha Music Research Institute. She has performed and presented solo recitals at venues including the IDRS, the Florida Music Teachers Association and Carnegie Hall. Dr. Hwang was invited to present her papers at the Research Institute of Asian Women at Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul, Korea in March of 2019 and has been invited to give a lecture about Classical Music and Korean Film at the Department of Korean Culture Contents at Hanyang University in November of 2021. She is a founder and member of the Tomo Bassoon Trio, formed to inspire new Asian bassoon students. Dr. Hwang also has been invited to give a lecture recital entitled, “Searching for the Influence of Korean Identity, Aesthetics and Culture in the Exiled Korean-German Composer Isang Yun’s Monolog für Fagott (1983/84)” at Columbia University in April of 2021.

Dr. Hwang earned a D.M.A. from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an M.M. from UCLA. She holds a B.M. from Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul, Korea, and studied Music Pedagogy at the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg in Germany. She also studied at the University of Southern California and received a Performance Diploma from Boston University.