D019: Rethinking the Cold War amid the Global Pandemic: Literature, Film, and Media of and beyond Divided Korea

Organizer(s)

• JK

  Ji Young Kim

  Queens College, City University of New York, United States
• WY

  We Jung Yi

  Vanderbilt University, United States

Chair(s)

• KJ

  Kelly Jeong

  University of California, Riverside, United States

Paper Presenter(s)

• JK

  Ji Young Kim

  Queens College, City University of New York, United States
• SL

  Soonyoung Lee

  University of California, Riverside, United States
• WY

  We Jung Yi

  Vanderbilt University, United States
• SJ

  Seung-Hee Jeon

  Boston College, United States

Discussant(s)

• KJ

  Kelly Jeong

  University of California, Riverside, United States

With the global pandemic grinding everyday life to an uncertain halt, concerned observers relate this new normal to a new civilizational crisis—a critical moment that impels us to rethink how we cope with extremes. If humanity is again “at war against an invisible enemy” that forces us to close borders and realign allies, then the Korean experience of an unending war allows us to gain historical insights into the current situation. Having dispersed, as well as contained, millions of lives across the Korean Peninsula and beyond, the Cold War not only portended the discriminatory biopolitics of today; the era also witnessed social movements and cultural forms that interrogated the given order of things and led to revolutionary changes.

To relearn from that history amid this viral time, our panel explores various Korean cultural texts, produced from the 1940s to the 2010s, that have tackled the Cold War–imposed (b)orders. Kim revisits the formative period of Cold War Korean literature and scrutinizes its bewilderment and failure in embodying state-sanctioned ideologies. Lee approaches the youth culture of 1970s South Korea as a heterogenous site of cultural politics where an alternative imagination was interwoven with authoritarian sensibilities. Yi rereads canonical division novels along with a contemporary war webtoon and connects, through the recurring trope of liminal figures, evolving visions for traversing Cold War binaries. By applying a nomadic, non-anthropocentric perspective to the division system, Jeon’s discussion of two recent works of fiction offers alternative possibilities for a post-pandemic world.

Presentations:

• (Mis)Understanding the Cold War: On the Making of National Literature in Two Koreas
  

  Paper Presenter: Ji Young Kim – Queens College, City University of New York
• Cold War Epistemology in the Cultural Politics of 1970s South Korea: Focusing on the Discourses Surrounding Youth Culture
  

  Paper Presenter: Soonyoung Lee – University of California, Riverside
• From Division Novel to War Comics: South Korean Imagining beyond Cold War Duality
  

  Paper Presenter: We Jung Yi – Vanderbilt University
• Imagining Nomadic and Post-Anthropocentric Subjectivity in Cold War Korea: An Examination of Two Recent South Korean Works of Fiction
  

  Paper Presenter: Seung-Hee Jeon – Boston College