Panel 19: Transnational Korea

Chair: Cecilia Kim, University of Notre Dame

Panelists

Inha Park, University of Notre Dame, “The Distance to Korea: The Untold Italian Representations of the Korean War”

Italy was inflamed by the long Cold War’s first ‘hot war,’ the Korean War (1950-1953). Commonly described as a ‘forgotten war,’ the Korean War is occasionally mentioned in Italian Cold War historiography, but the remarkable plethora of Italian narratives and representations of the Korean War has largely been overlooked in the scholarship. This paper investigates the many ways in which Italians from ordinary working-class people to prominent artists and intellectuals have symbolized, represented, and recounted the Korean War. Among those whose work I will discuss are Pier Paolo Pasolini and Italo Calvino as well as human subjects for oral history behind the construction of neighborhoods called Corea (Korea in Italian), throughout Italy, whose naming stems from Italians’ equation of their humble living conditions and the image of war-ravaged Korea during the conflict. Reflecting on Pasolini’s description of some Italians’ indifference to the plight of the Korean people as a product of apparent ‘lontananza’ (distance in Italian), this study will shed light on Italy’s peculiar ways of relating to the farthest other, which, I will argue, is actually much closer to the center of Italian culture than we have yet to realize. This in turn will illuminate the significant role that Korea played in the rebirth, reconstruction, and revision of postwar Italian culture.

Haerin Do, University of California, Irvine, “Dendrochronology: Korean Argentine Migration and Labor History Inscribed in the Materiality of Wood”

This paper examines the immigration history of the Korean Argentine diaspora through contemporary artwork and metaphorically compares it to tree rings. The Korean immigrants in Argentina, often described as the ‚‘rhizomatic diaspora’ who repeat migration and re-migration, are entangled with the sociopolitical incidents of the 20th century, encompassing the transatlantic slave trade, Japanese colonialism, the Pacific War, and neoliberalism. However, unlike Korean Americans, the history of the Korean Argentine diaspora has been understudied and marginalized within Western-centric Korean diasporic history due to the comparatively scant discursive link between Asia and Latin America. Nonetheless, their transpacific journey has recently been visually represented through international biennales, which inevitably detour through the West. This paper critically analyzes the wooden sculpture series Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One by the Korean Argentine artist Kim Yun Shin, which encapsulates the history of Korean immigrants who arrived in Latin America as plantation and garment laborers. Specifically, the paper focuses on the labor-intensive process of carving the sculptures, visual contrast revealing both the rough bark and inner flesh of the wood within the works, symbolizing the deterritorialization of fixed concepts of national identity and skin color, and the contrasting vegetation species of Korean and Argentinean wood used by Kim. By expanding on the metaphor of tree rings that record the passage of time and seasonal climate changes within their organic structure, this paper demonstrates how the materiality of wood serves as living archives shaping the history of Korean Argentine immigrants by traversing conflicting climate zones.

Kyung Mo Kang, University of Notre Dame, “The North Koreans’ View of Human Rights Crisis and Prosecution”

Since the UN concluded that the North Korean government committed crimes against humanity and urged to seek a mechanism to hold individuals’ accountability in 2014, many scholars and institutions have studied the legal mechanism or type of the criminal tribunal for the North Korean situation. Yet, there is an important factor missing in such research, which is the perspective of the North Korean people, the stakeholder of the problem. It is because we assume that the North Korean people have same or similar awareness of human rights problem. North Korea has been largely isolated from the world for last 70 years, and the North Koreans are brainwashed without any access to the news of information of the outside of North Korea. Therefore, it would be reasonable to believe that the North Korean people have different views and perspectives from our thoughts about human rights crisis and accountability, and future democracy in North Korean society. In this regard, I conducted in-depth interviews with 51 North Korean escapees in South Korea to observe their thoughts by adopting qualitative research method. In my proposed presentation, I will share and discuss the findings of the North Korean people’s perspectives and opinions on who do they think perpetrators, do they support the prosecution of the perpetrators such as Kim Jong-un, and the criminal tribunal’s effect on democratic transition in North Korea.