Abstract:Before embarking upon a filmmaking career, Korean-Chinese director Zhang Lu was a novelist and a professor of Chinese Literature at Yanbian University in Northeastern China. His career embodies a series of migrations including his media migration from literature to film. Similarly, his narrative often draws on an expansive trajectory of migration across national borders and sets in diasporic spaces inhabited by strangers, travellers, and exiles. The article identifies a set of distinctive aesthetic and thematic features in Zhang Lu's films to examine the meaning of "border" in today's world where border-crossing has become an everyday practice for some yet, for others, the most perilous act of survival. This discussion takes particular interest in the director's aesthetic choice of slow cinema as a gesture towards counterbalancing the dynamism of Korean blockbusters whose action-packed spectacles are intended to represent the nationalist yearning for action, progress, and prosperity. Rather than enacting the Korean dream of rapid entrance to the First World, his films are deliberately slowed down in order to observe how the Korean dream simultaneously allures and thwarts not only ethnic, national, and cultural others but also socioeconomically marginalized Koreans. Through the analysis of Desert Dream (2007) and A Quiet Dream (2016), the aim is to identify a possible alternative to the highly commercialized Korean cinema in Zhang Lu's cinema of inaction. The two films seek a new cinematic expression to embrace an increasingly multicultural South Korea and its permeable boundaries in the face of the transnational fusion of people and cultures.
{"title":"In Search of Korean Dream: Zhang Lu's Cinema of Inaction","authors":"H. Lee","doi":"10.1353/ks.2021.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ks.2021.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Before embarking upon a filmmaking career, Korean-Chinese director Zhang Lu was a novelist and a professor of Chinese Literature at Yanbian University in Northeastern China. His career embodies a series of migrations including his media migration from literature to film. Similarly, his narrative often draws on an expansive trajectory of migration across national borders and sets in diasporic spaces inhabited by strangers, travellers, and exiles. The article identifies a set of distinctive aesthetic and thematic features in Zhang Lu's films to examine the meaning of \"border\" in today's world where border-crossing has become an everyday practice for some yet, for others, the most perilous act of survival. This discussion takes particular interest in the director's aesthetic choice of slow cinema as a gesture towards counterbalancing the dynamism of Korean blockbusters whose action-packed spectacles are intended to represent the nationalist yearning for action, progress, and prosperity. Rather than enacting the Korean dream of rapid entrance to the First World, his films are deliberately slowed down in order to observe how the Korean dream simultaneously allures and thwarts not only ethnic, national, and cultural others but also socioeconomically marginalized Koreans. Through the analysis of Desert Dream (2007) and A Quiet Dream (2016), the aim is to identify a possible alternative to the highly commercialized Korean cinema in Zhang Lu's cinema of inaction. The two films seek a new cinematic expression to embrace an increasingly multicultural South Korea and its permeable boundaries in the face of the transnational fusion of people and cultures.","PeriodicalId":43382,"journal":{"name":"Korean Studies","volume":"25 1","pages":"117 - 140"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75421062","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:While there is an increasing interest in the economic and political relationships of North Koreans in exile to the homeland, little has been said on the significance of North Koreans' everyday cultural practices in the places they resettle. Based on a year of interviews and participant observation, this article examines an often-overlooked aspect of North Korean spiritual life: the performance of Confucian commemorative practices in North Korea and in the homes of North Koreans now living in South Korea and in Japan. Specifically, this article asks what North Koreans' commemorative practices tell us about the seismic economic, political, and social changes that have occurred in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) since the collapse of the bi-polar cold war world order. How has the political economy of the DPRK, established with the Kim family at its heart, shaped the relationship of the living to the dead? And how do individuals who survived traumatic experiences, such as the North Korean famine, draw on ritual practices to make sense of the experience of living in exile? I suggest that acts of remembrance help divided families negotiate feelings of guilt and sorrow and enable members of the growing North Korean diaspora to foster a collective sense of self and reconnect to the country they were forced to leave.
{"title":"Performing Death and Memory: Ancestral Rites of North Koreans in Exile","authors":"Markus Bell","doi":"10.1353/ks.2021.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ks.2021.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:While there is an increasing interest in the economic and political relationships of North Koreans in exile to the homeland, little has been said on the significance of North Koreans' everyday cultural practices in the places they resettle. Based on a year of interviews and participant observation, this article examines an often-overlooked aspect of North Korean spiritual life: the performance of Confucian commemorative practices in North Korea and in the homes of North Koreans now living in South Korea and in Japan. Specifically, this article asks what North Koreans' commemorative practices tell us about the seismic economic, political, and social changes that have occurred in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) since the collapse of the bi-polar cold war world order. How has the political economy of the DPRK, established with the Kim family at its heart, shaped the relationship of the living to the dead? And how do individuals who survived traumatic experiences, such as the North Korean famine, draw on ritual practices to make sense of the experience of living in exile? I suggest that acts of remembrance help divided families negotiate feelings of guilt and sorrow and enable members of the growing North Korean diaspora to foster a collective sense of self and reconnect to the country they were forced to leave.","PeriodicalId":43382,"journal":{"name":"Korean Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"141 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78269587","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
John Jorgensen’s scholarly introduction to and annotated translation of the Chŏnggamnok represents a monumental piece of scholarship that makes accessible for the first time in English a body of material describing the hopes of aspirations of non-educated and disempowered Koreans stretching back to the Chosŏn period (1392–1910) and beyond. The Foresight of Dark Knowing is essentially two books bound together in one: Part I, the Translator’s Introduction (pp. 1–202), is basically a monograph on the history of premodern Korean prognostication and geomantic techniques within its East Asian cultural milieu. Part II, Translation (pp. 203–317), comprises thirty-two seemingly discrete texts that together are known by the title Chŏnggamnok 鄭鑑錄. The remainder of the book consists of an appendix on the sexagenary (kapcha) cycle (p. 319), abbreviations and notes (pp. 321–432), a works cited list (pp. 433–443), and an index (pp. 445–451). Jorgensen’s introduction to the translation is actually a detailed monograph on the various kinds of prognosticative and geomantic beliefs
{"title":"The Foresight of Dark Knowing: Chŏnggamnok and Insurrectionary Prognostication in Pre-modern Korea by John Jorgensen (review)","authors":"R. Mcbride","doi":"10.1353/ks.2021.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ks.2021.0010","url":null,"abstract":"John Jorgensen’s scholarly introduction to and annotated translation of the Chŏnggamnok represents a monumental piece of scholarship that makes accessible for the first time in English a body of material describing the hopes of aspirations of non-educated and disempowered Koreans stretching back to the Chosŏn period (1392–1910) and beyond. The Foresight of Dark Knowing is essentially two books bound together in one: Part I, the Translator’s Introduction (pp. 1–202), is basically a monograph on the history of premodern Korean prognostication and geomantic techniques within its East Asian cultural milieu. Part II, Translation (pp. 203–317), comprises thirty-two seemingly discrete texts that together are known by the title Chŏnggamnok 鄭鑑錄. The remainder of the book consists of an appendix on the sexagenary (kapcha) cycle (p. 319), abbreviations and notes (pp. 321–432), a works cited list (pp. 433–443), and an index (pp. 445–451). Jorgensen’s introduction to the translation is actually a detailed monograph on the various kinds of prognosticative and geomantic beliefs","PeriodicalId":43382,"journal":{"name":"Korean Studies","volume":"22 1","pages":"214 - 216"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82042616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vicious Circuits: Korea's IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century by Joseph Jonghyun Jeon (review)","authors":"S. Kim","doi":"10.1353/ks.2021.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ks.2021.0012","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43382,"journal":{"name":"Korean Studies","volume":"7 1","pages":"219 - 221"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83637854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The study of the Stone Age on the Korean peninsular began with Japanese researchers. Torii Ryuzo was the first archaeologist to take charge of and shape archaeological investigations of the Stone Age. However, the research results were used to defend the logic of imperialism rather than the academic domain. Torii used the past relationship between the Korean peninsula and Japan to locate the ancestral Japanese and provide evidence to support his "theory of the common ancestral origins of Korean and Japanese races (日鮮同祖論 nissendosoron)."Unlike Taiwan, in Chosŏn, which had a direct historical relationship with Japan, the results of archaeological investigations were only used as supporting materials to explain the prehistoric and ancient times of Japan, which in turn resulted in consolidating a colonial view of history (i.e., Korean history distorted by Japanese historians during the Japanese occupation). This is why it is difficult to deny the shadow of imperialism in the archaeology of colonial Chosŏn.
{"title":"Japanese Imperialism and the Investigation of Stone Age in Colonial Joseon","authors":"Kisung Yi","doi":"10.1353/ks.2021.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ks.2021.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The study of the Stone Age on the Korean peninsular began with Japanese researchers. Torii Ryuzo was the first archaeologist to take charge of and shape archaeological investigations of the Stone Age. However, the research results were used to defend the logic of imperialism rather than the academic domain. Torii used the past relationship between the Korean peninsula and Japan to locate the ancestral Japanese and provide evidence to support his \"theory of the common ancestral origins of Korean and Japanese races (日鮮同祖論 nissendosoron).\"Unlike Taiwan, in Chosŏn, which had a direct historical relationship with Japan, the results of archaeological investigations were only used as supporting materials to explain the prehistoric and ancient times of Japan, which in turn resulted in consolidating a colonial view of history (i.e., Korean history distorted by Japanese historians during the Japanese occupation). This is why it is difficult to deny the shadow of imperialism in the archaeology of colonial Chosŏn.","PeriodicalId":43382,"journal":{"name":"Korean Studies","volume":"2019 1","pages":"192 - 213"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87829601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas by Jinah Kim","authors":"Jed Lea-Henry","doi":"10.1353/ks.2021.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ks.2021.0011","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43382,"journal":{"name":"Korean Studies","volume":"228 1","pages":"216-219"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138534635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In the past, the notion of a common Korean ethnicity shaped how North Korean migrants in South Korea understood themselves, and in turn were viewed and assisted by the South Korean government and its resettlement regime. However, new frameworks of belonging have emerged that focus on molding the North Korean migrant population into either “multicultural” (tamunhwa) or “global” (kŭllobŏl) citizens of South Korea. These are two competing, locally inflected idioms of “flexible citizenship” (à la Aihwa Ong) that are meant to capture North Korean migrants’ border crossing experiences and transnational aspirations. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, conducted between 2009 and 2017, this article examines the development of these new narratives of belonging. The “multicultural” framework emerged to categorize North Korean migrants and nonethnic Korean migrants together for provisions and services, whereas the “global” framework values the ability of upwardly mobile North Korean migrants to navigate transnational environments extending beyond South Korea. This article examines the process by which the “global citizenry” framework has overpowered the “multicultural” framework because the former provided North Korean migrants with a narrative that granted more economic opportunities and enhanced their role in the envisioned future of a unified Korea. This article brings into sharp relief the key role of the government and its migrant resettlement regime in shaping these new narratives. It also shows the ways in which the “global citizenry” narrative has become intertwined with a new kind of nationalist trope rather than replacing the old ethnic nationalist narrative.
{"title":"North Korean Migrants in South Korea: “Multicultural” or “Global” Citizens?","authors":"Young-a Park","doi":"10.1353/ks.2020.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ks.2020.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the past, the notion of a common Korean ethnicity shaped how North Korean migrants in South Korea understood themselves, and in turn were viewed and assisted by the South Korean government and its resettlement regime. However, new frameworks of belonging have emerged that focus on molding the North Korean migrant population into either “multicultural” (tamunhwa) or “global” (kŭllobŏl) citizens of South Korea. These are two competing, locally inflected idioms of “flexible citizenship” (à la Aihwa Ong) that are meant to capture North Korean migrants’ border crossing experiences and transnational aspirations. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, conducted between 2009 and 2017, this article examines the development of these new narratives of belonging. The “multicultural” framework emerged to categorize North Korean migrants and nonethnic Korean migrants together for provisions and services, whereas the “global” framework values the ability of upwardly mobile North Korean migrants to navigate transnational environments extending beyond South Korea. This article examines the process by which the “global citizenry” framework has overpowered the “multicultural” framework because the former provided North Korean migrants with a narrative that granted more economic opportunities and enhanced their role in the envisioned future of a unified Korea. This article brings into sharp relief the key role of the government and its migrant resettlement regime in shaping these new narratives. It also shows the ways in which the “global citizenry” narrative has become intertwined with a new kind of nationalist trope rather than replacing the old ethnic nationalist narrative.","PeriodicalId":43382,"journal":{"name":"Korean Studies","volume":"62 1","pages":"123 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91096568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Communication, Digital Media, and Popular Culture in Korea: Contemporary Research and Future Prospects ed. by Dal Yong Jin and Nojin Kwak (review)","authors":"Su Young Choi","doi":"10.1353/ks.2020.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ks.2020.0010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43382,"journal":{"name":"Korean Studies","volume":"90 1","pages":"160 - 162"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90659785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-02DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-68434-5
Hansol Woo, G. LeTendre
{"title":"International Perspectives on Translation, Education and Innovation in Japanese and Korean Societies ed. by David G. Hebert (review)","authors":"Hansol Woo, G. LeTendre","doi":"10.1007/978-3-319-68434-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68434-5","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43382,"journal":{"name":"Korean Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"157 - 159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80119861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Over the past decade, we have witnessed a dramatic shift in the role of North Korean women, from traditional mother to breadwinner. Economic collapse, famine, and the so-called Arduous March have had unintended consequences for North Koreans, forcing them to become more active economic agents. Many North Korean women started working in the black market (jangmadang), and became extremely mobile, seeking economic opportunities in new cities, new regions, and even across national borders. As a result, the mobility of North Korean women and their economic activities in the market have had a significant influence in contemporary North Korean families. It can be argued that the traditional woman, or typical mother under patriarchy, is now considered to be less ideal, giving way to a new, economically dynamic model for women in North Korean society. North Korean women retain a strong commitment to motherhood when they cross into the Sino-North Korean borderland, and actively engage with the children they have left behind through remittances and regular phone calls. Geographical distance and their illegal status do hamper their mothering practices to an extent, causing intimacy and motherhood to undergo substantial changes in North Korean families. Nevertheless, North Korean migrant mothers still prioritize long-distance motherhood over their own personal well-being as well as that of any new families they make or join in the course of their migration trajectories.
{"title":"Mobile North Korean Women and Long-Distance Motherhood: The (Re)Construction of Intimacy and the Ambivalence of Family","authors":"S. K. Kim","doi":"10.1353/ks.2020.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ks.2020.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Over the past decade, we have witnessed a dramatic shift in the role of North Korean women, from traditional mother to breadwinner. Economic collapse, famine, and the so-called Arduous March have had unintended consequences for North Koreans, forcing them to become more active economic agents. Many North Korean women started working in the black market (jangmadang), and became extremely mobile, seeking economic opportunities in new cities, new regions, and even across national borders. As a result, the mobility of North Korean women and their economic activities in the market have had a significant influence in contemporary North Korean families. It can be argued that the traditional woman, or typical mother under patriarchy, is now considered to be less ideal, giving way to a new, economically dynamic model for women in North Korean society. North Korean women retain a strong commitment to motherhood when they cross into the Sino-North Korean borderland, and actively engage with the children they have left behind through remittances and regular phone calls. Geographical distance and their illegal status do hamper their mothering practices to an extent, causing intimacy and motherhood to undergo substantial changes in North Korean families. Nevertheless, North Korean migrant mothers still prioritize long-distance motherhood over their own personal well-being as well as that of any new families they make or join in the course of their migration trajectories.","PeriodicalId":43382,"journal":{"name":"Korean Studies","volume":"76 1","pages":"122 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77622870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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