Translating Korean Literature into Korean: Modern bilingual literature and translation

Wednesday January 22th, 18:00 c.t., Wilhelmstraße 133, Room 30

Dr. Donghee Kim is a Research Professor at the Research Institute of Korean Studies, Korea University. She is currently a Visiting Professor in Korean Studies at the University of Tübingen and a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Korean Studies, Ritsumeikan University in Japan. Dr. Kim received her Ph.D. in Korean Literature from Korea University, and her main research areas include Modern and Contemporary Korean Poetry, Colonial Bilingual Literature, and Translation. She also works as a translator and has published several books. Dr. Kim is the editorial director of The Society of Yi-Sang and serves on the editorial board of The Korean Poetics Society. 

Korean literature is traditionally divided into Classical and Modern literature based on historical eras. As literature is created in a language that reflects the social and cultural consciousness of its time, Modern Korean literature brings with it new perspectives and expressions that differ significantly from those of Classical literature. How does the language of Modern literature differ from that of Classical literature? What new perceptions are embedded within this language? This lecture aims to explore these questions. Particularly, in countries using Chinese characters, how have these languages adapted to articulate novel concepts from new civilizations of Latin-alphabet based languages? Such questions are central to the emergence of Modern Korean literature. Translation has played a pivotal role in adapting and interpreting new ideas and cultural influences within Korean expression.

War and Society Seen Through PX and MPC (Military Payment Certificates)

Wednesday January 8th, 18:00 c.t., Wilhelmstraße 133, Room 30

Dongwon Lee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Korean History at Seoul National University (SNU) from 2021. He received his B.A. (2001), M.A. (2004) and Ph.D. (2019) in Korean History from SNU. The title of his dissertation is "A Study of U.S. Military Aid to Korea during the First Republic of Korea". His research interests focus on contemporary Korean history. Since his Ph.D thesis on US military aid to South Korea, he has studied East Asian Cold War history and economic history, with a focus on Korea-US relations, and has expanded his research to include the history of science and technology, medical history, and inter-Korean relations. As a current visiting professor at Freie Universität Berlin, his goal is to write a book based on his dissertation that reflects his latest research.

Korean Contemporary history has unfolded in deep connection with three major wars: World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Since World War II, the U.S. military has operated the PX (Post Exchange) and MPC (Military Payment Certificate) systems at its bases, and the base towns and black markets that developed around them became a global phenomenon. In Korea, the influence of military aid, base towns, black markets, and the PX-MPC system has had a lasting impact on the economy and society, spanning the U.S. military occupation, the Korean War, postwar recovery and aid-driven economy, military rule, Vietnam War troop deployments, and the era of developmental dictatorship.

This presentation will focus on the PX, MPC, and the black market as legacies of war and military aid, and how they have impacted the economies and societies of regions where the U.S. troops were stationed, such as Korea and Vietnam.

Contesting Chrononormativity: Vicarious Kinship and Unofficial Historiography in Anna Kim’s Novel Die große Heimkehr (The Great Homecoming, 2017)

Wednesday December 18th, 18:00 c.t., Wilhelmstraße 133, R. 30

Qingyang Freya Zhou is a PhD candidate in German and Film Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and a research fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her dissertation examines literary and cinematic exchanges between Germany and East Asia, particularly socialist internationalism and migration studies. Her recent journal articles won prizes from the Coalition of Women in German and the German Studies Association. Her co-edited volume (with Qinna Shen and Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick), titled Charting Asian German Film History Imagination, Collaboration, and Diasporic Representation is forthcoming with Camden House in 2025.

Since the early 1990s, a burgeoning corpus of literature and film in Germany and South Korea has grappled with questions of national division and (re)unification. This talk examines this shared historical legacy of East/West Germany and North/South Korea by focusing on Korean diasporic writer Anna Kim’s German language historical fiction, Die große Heimkehr (The Great Homecoming, 2017). The novel explores Cold War ideological divisions through three protagonists a South Korean narrator, his Americanized childhood friend, and a love interest suspected of being a North Korean spy. It portrays the protagonists’ political refuge from South Korea to Japan and their encounters with the Japanese Korean (Zainichi) community’s “Great Homecoming” to North Korea in 1959-1960. This talk examines the themes of imaginary kinship, temporal disjuncture, and unofficial memory making in Kim’s novel. Part one of the talk analyzes the novel’s narrative strategy using Walter Benjamin’s concept of historical continuity in traditional storytelling. Part two then explores the novel’s intermedial references to photographic media through the queer femininity of the femme fatale. I argue that by constructing imaginary kinship beyond bloodlines and subjectivizing history through the fragile memory of an individual, Kim’s novel advances a feminist critique of ethnocentric notions of genealogical progression through monumental time.

A Political Sound: K-Pop and the Postcolonial Interruption

Wednesday December 11th, 18:00 c.t., Wilhelmstraße 133 , Room 30

Dr. Paroma Ghose is a sociocultural historian currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the “Confronting Decline” project at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Munich Germany. In her doctoral thesis she used the lyrics of French rap songs to write a history of the ‘Other' in France (1981-2012). Her postdoctoral research looks at postcolonial voices and the shaping of the modern world using South Korean popular music (1987-present) as its principal lens. She is currently preparing a monograph on K-pop and the ‘postcolonial interruption’ (Yoon 2017), which she began as a National Research Foundation of Korea Postdoctoral Fellow at Yonsei University in 2022. where she worked with Professor Michael Kim.

In January 2022, American talk show host Jimmy Kimmel likened South Korean group BTS’ burgeoning popularity to the spread of an ‘Asian virus’. His comments stirred fleeting controversy and were quickly forgotten once Kimmel apologised for his misplaced humour. Despite BTS’s immense global cultural capital, their musical prowess has outpaced cultural cognizance. BTS’ rise and the growing acclaim of Korean popular music at large, is experienced as an anomaly by the crudely defined if still relevant category of ‘the West’.  Although South Korean popular culture (post-1987), characterised as a ’postcolonial interruption' (Yoon 2017), poses a significant challenge to Western dominion over the global cultural sphere, Korean and Western cultural actors do not meet as equals on the international stage. Contemporary geopolitical norms, defined by past unequal power relations (colonialism, conflict, trade, globalisation, etc.) and their resultant cumulative prejudice, still govern the terms of these encounters. Thus, the rising popularity of an increasingly commercial, predominantly apolitical popular music has evinced fractures in historical systems of global governance. Using examples from South Korean popular music, this lecture will historicize the unfolding geopolitical crisis which global encounters between national representations of popular culture have exposed.

Exploring Korean Women’s Intersectional Spectatorship: A Cultural History of Colonial Everyday Life in the Early Twentieth Century

Wednesday December 4th, 18:00 c.t., Wilhelmstraße 133 , Room 30

Dr. Sung Un Gang is a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute of Architecture and the Collaborative Research Centre 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces” at Technische Universität Berlin. He earned his doctoral degree for his dissertation The Making of Modern Subjects: Public Discourses on Korean Female Spectators in the Early Twentieth Century (Bielefeld: transcript 2024) in Theater and Media Studies from Universität zu Köln. He was a junior fellow at the International Center for Korean Studies of Kyujanggak Institute (2018) and worked as a research associate in Korean Studies at the University of Bonn (2019-2022). He won several grants, including DAAD scholarship (2009 and 2010-2012), doctoral scholarship of a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for Humanities Cologne (2015-2019), and Academy of Korean Studies Grant (2023). His works focus on the intersections of social minority and space, postcolonial historiography of East Asia, and the Asian diaspora in Germany.

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) sparked debates on gaze and gender relations. While Black feminist scholars and queer theorists have revealed complex ways in which gender, race, power, and gaze mutually shape one another, these debates have largely focused on Anglo-American historical contexts. Meanwhile, gaze in the Korean context was deeply intertwined with centuries-long spatial and social segregation based on gender and stratum, as well as modernization and colonization since the late nineteenth century. This lecture introduces the concept of intersectional spectatorship as a new analytical tool for understanding colonial Korean everyday life in the early twentieth century. Through a historical discourse analysis of newspapers, magazines, and fictional texts, I argue that Korean female audiences were heterogeneous individuals who negotiated their gaze and agenda within and beyond the theater space. Doing so, they expanded their social realm, often clashing with top-down mission of modernization and colonial assimilation. This lecture rediscovers Korean female spectators as active agents who co-constructed colonial publicness.

Regionalism in South Korea: Why do people’s emotions become political?

Wednesday November 20, 2024, 18:00 c.t ., Wilhelmstraße 133, R. 30

Kyungmee Park is a professor in the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy at Jeonbuk National University, Republic of Korea Korea She studied in Ewha Womans University and her PhD dissertation is “Continuities and Changes of Party Organizations in Korea Comparison of Organizational Changes of the Democratic Justice Party and the Party for Peace and Democracy” Her research interests are party politics, legislative politics, electoral politics, and Korean politics Her current main interest is how political institutions make effects on the people and politicians.

„All people live with their own emotions as well as way of thinking, habits and preferences Emotions affect people’s behavior We have seen that emotions make people the happier, while making them more difficult and sad In addition, group emotions can sometimes lead to situations of extreme conflict So why do people’s emotions become political? Korean politics is regionally divided despite social and cultural homogeneity with shared historical memories Various elections are fiercely contested with support for and against the two regional parties There are two arguments as to why Korean regionalism emerged the gap in regional development and political mobilization The case of Korean regionalism implies that the political mobilization of people’s emotions blinds people’s eyes.

Transforming Rural Places through Digitalization? Observations from Chile and South Korea

Wednesday November 6th 2024, 18:00 c.t., Wilhelmstraße 133 , Room 30

Lee Jae-Young is an architect and researcher based in Berlin. Since 2022 she is part of the CRC 1265 "Re-Figuration of Spaces" at the Technical University of Berlin and the Leibniz-Institute for Research on Society and Space in Erkner. In her dissertation, she explores territorial dynamics and grassroots practices amid the commodification and urbanization of contested rural places. Her research is informed by her work as an architect with Gyaw Gyaw since 2016 at the rural border between Thailand and Myanmar.

Since the global proliferation of digital networks, platform tourism and e-commerce have been closely associated with rural poverty alleviation, development and de-peripheralization. Concurrently, rural gentrification and spatial injustices increasingly manifest in the socio-political polarization of rural areas that can be observed on a global scale. To examine this critical juncture from the perspective of rural residents, this lecture presents empirical observations based on two field studies conducted in mountainous rural areas in Chile and South Korea.  The primary concern of this research is to explore the negotiation processes and spatial transformations that emerge as rural residents engage in platform tourism and e-commerce. The lecture first starts with conceptualizations of rurality and peripherality. This is followed by encounters of socio-spatial continuities and ruptures associated with the proliferation of platform economies and the role of more-than-human agencies that shape spatial trajectories. To conclude, first reflections on the spatial implications of digital platform economies are presented alongside empirical material. With its scope, the research thus links to the most recent ‘peripheral turn’ in global urban studies, which interrogates different experiences and modes of urbanization as seen from theoretical and geographical margins.

The Challenging Situation Facing Korean Politics Today 

현재 한국 정치가 직면한 도전적 상황

Wednesday October 30th 2024, 18:00 c.t., Wilhelmstraße 133 , Room 30

Lee Tahney was a member of the Korean National Assembly (Democratic Party, 2020-2024) and is currently a visiting scholar at Duisburg-Essen University. Before joining politics, he served in the Judiciary as a judge for 11 years and practiced as a public lawyer at the Human Rights Foundation, Gonggam. His main areas in legal domain relate to Constitutional law (Constitutional Court of Korea, delegated researcher, 2018) and criminal procedures (Harvard, LLM, 2015). He was elected three times as one of ‘the judges of the year’ by the Korean Bar Association, and became a strong public figure when he submitted a resignation letter briefly after being appointed as the Deputy Director-General of the National Court Administration of the Supreme Court of Korea, refusing to cooperate with the judicial scandal called 'the Judiciary Blacklist File' during the former president Park Geun-Hye era (2013-2017). He announced he would not run in 2024 general election in order to concentrate on the political reformation campaign to challenge the regressive step to abolish proportional representation amendment on the election law carried out in 2019. This evoked much public attention and controversy, which culminated in putting a stop to the two major political parties’ regressive trial.

This lecture draws on Mr. Lee Tahney's diverse experiences as a MP to examine the challenging situations currently facing Korean politics and to share future prospects. Korea's democratization in 1987 marked a transition from an authoritarian regime, leading to significant achievements in consolidating democracy and progress in various areas of society. However, recent years have seen a buildup of deep discontent. According to an OECD report released last summer, public trust in the Korean National Assembly is around 20%, trust in political parties even lower, both at the lowest level among the 30 countries surveyed. The figures are considered anomalous given Korea's international competitiveness, and the phrase "politics of despair" has become prevalent in media and popular culture. Both experts and the public report a stark lack of political efficacy. Mr. Lee attributes this to what he terms "reflexive benefit politics" which is rooted in two rather recent developments: changes in political structure and the populist shift of major parties.

Establishing a start-up business in Korea as a foreign entrepreneur

Wednesday October 16th 2024, 18:00 c.t., Wilhelmstraße 133 , Room 30

Dr. Stephan Gerschewski is Associate Professor in Strategy & Enterprise at Edinburgh Business School, Heriot-Watt University, UK. Prior to joining Heriot-Watt University, Dr Gerschewski worked as a Senior Lecturer in International Marketing at Kent Business School, University of Kent, UK, and as a Lecturer in International Business & Strategy at Henley Business School, University of Reading, UK. Dr. Gerschewski is currently a Visiting Professor in International Business at University of Tübingen and University of Göttingen. Dr. Gerschewski’s main research areas relate to International Entrepreneurship, export strategy and performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and cross-cultural management. Dr. Gerschewski has published several articles in major academic journals (ABS 4, SJR - Q1, ABDC - A). Dr. Gerschewski is Associate Editor of European Management Journal (EMJ), and he serves on the Editorial Review Board of Multinational Business Review (MBR) and Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development (JSBED).

Korea has experienced ‘miracle’ economic growth rates in the recent past. Korea has not only developed major global players, such as Samsung and Hyundai, but has also become an increasingly attractive market for foreign companies and foreign entrepreneurs. The rapid economic growth of South Korea after World War 2 has been commonly termed as the ‘Miracle on the Hangang River’. This lecture will introduce the economic, political, and cultural environment that influences doing business in Korea. In particular, the lecture will focus on how foreign entrepreneurs and companies can establish a successful start-up business in Korea. The contents will include market entry, marketing, and human resource management.