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Sohye Kim

(Postdoctoral Weinberg Fellow, Northwestern University)

“Crossing Borders of Memory: The Making of Transnational Post/memory in Zhang Lu’s Films”

2:00-4:00pm, Classics 312

*Please note the special date and location*

On January 16th from 2:00pm to 4:00pm the Art and Politics of East Asia workshop will host Sohye Kim (Postdoctoral Weinberg Fellow, Northwestern University). She will deliver a mock job talk titled “Crossing Borders of Memory: The Making of Transnational Post/memory in Zhang Lu’s Films.” Sohye provides the following abstract:

Zhang Lu (1962-) is one of the most emblematic diaspora filmmakers in South Korea today. In the six feature films which he released between his debut in 2004 and 2009, Zhang portrayed ethnic Koreans across China, Korea and Mongolia who are pushed by inexorable forces to the peripheries of, and boundaries between nation-states. However from 2012 to 2018, Zhang set his films exclusively in South Korea, his ancestral homeland to where he had relocated from his home in China. As both spatial and thematic departures for the director, films such as Scenery (2013), Gyeongju (2014), Love and…(2015), A Quite Dream (2016), and Ode to the Goose (2018) refrain from explicit portrayals of the diasporic issues that had surfaced prominently in his earlier works. This talk examines how Zhang’s “South Korean” films negotiate the formation of national culture in the homeland and in turn, how they uncover new forms of transnational practices through cinematic imagination and spectatorial experience. Specific focus is placed on Zhang’s articulation of his own diasporic history in relation to collective memories surrounding South Korean film culture and the internalized notion of border, from the physical border between the nation-states toward the metaphoric boundaries of human beings and their memories. The talk demonstrates how the audience’s temporal experience and memorialization of cinematic texts is intensely interwoven with the director’s memory. On this communal ground, I argue, Zhang’s films illuminate the mutually constitutive and dialectical relationship between national film culture and diasporic filmmakers, and in doing so, become a potential site of transnational postmemory.

There is no pre-circulated paper for this talk. Refreshments will be served at the workshop. We look forward to seeing you there!

The Arts and Politics of East Asia Workshop (APEA) is pleased to announce the Winter 2020 schedule. Unless otherwise noted, the workshop meets alternate Fridays from 3:00-5:00pm in Room 319 at the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) in the Harris School building (1155 E 60^th St).

Winter 2020 Schedule

1/16/20 (Thursday) – Sohye Kim, Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University

Mock Job Talk: “Crossing Borders of Memory: The Making of Transnational Post/memory in Zhang Lu’s Films”

*Please note the special date and location*

Location and time:  Classics 312 – 2:00-4:00pm

1/17/20 (Friday) – Yuanxie Shi, PhD Student, EALC

“A Preliminary Study in Chinese Divination Medicine in the Long Twentieth Century”

Discussant: H.S. Sum Cheuk Shing, PhD Student, EALC

Location and time:  Center for East Asian Studies 319 (Harris) – 3:00-5:00pm

1/24/20 (Friday) – Jae-yon Lee, Assistant Professor, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology

“The Topic Modeling of Kaebyŏk and the Rise of the Prophetic Critic in 1920s Korea”

Discussant: Ethan Waddell, PhD Student, EALC

Location and time:  Center for East Asian Studies 319 (Harris) – 3:00-5:00pm

2/7/20 (Friday) – Julian Yi Cao, Masters Program in the Humanities

“Visualizing Japan’s Wartime Pan-Asianism: The Ideological Landscape in Triumphal Entry into Nanjing”

Discussant: Jiakai Sheng, PhD Student, History

Location and time:  Center for East Asian Studies 319 (Harris) – 3:00-5:00pm

2/14/20 (Friday) – Justyna Jaguscik, Lecturer, University of Zurich

“Configurations of Gender and Class: On Zheng Xiaoqiong’s (郑小琼) Poetry”

Discussant: Yueling Ji, PhD Student, EALC

Location and time:  Center for East Asian Studies 319 (Harris) – 3:00-5:00pm

3/6/2020 (Friday) – Jiarui Sun, PhD Student, EALC

“Méng Subculture and Cyber Nationalism in Year, Hare, Affair”

Discussant: Alex Murphy, PhD Candidate, EALC

Location and time:  Center for East Asian Studies 319 (Harris) – 3:00-5:00pm

For further information, please consult the APEA website. Please contact both Jiayi Chen (jiayic@uchicago.edu) and Sabine Schulz (sabines@uchicago.edu) via email should you have any questions or need any assistance.

We are excited for our events this quarter and we hope you can attend!

Jue Hou

PhD Student, Committee on Social Thought

“The Cybernetic Writing Pad: Computer Science and Chinese Script Reforms”

Friday, November 1st, 3-5 p.m.

Location: Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St.) 

Discussant: Yueling Ji (PhD Student, EALC)

Next Friday from 3-5pm, the Art and Politics of East Asia (APEA) workshop is proud to host Jue Hou (PhD Student, Committee on Social Thought), who will present his paper “The Cybernetic Writing Pad: Computer Science and Chinese Script Reforms.” He summarizes the paper as follows:

In an era where the experience of Chinese writing is lived through such technologies as the Sogou cloud input, word prediction, and abundant choices of artistic fonts, Chinese scripts seems to have attained harmony with the world of machines. Yet as recently as the late 1970s and early 1980s, when all this was yet unforeseen, the Chinese character faced an impending doom of being abolished against the backdrop of the reopening of conversations on script reform previously interrupted by the Cultural Revolution and the various new demands instigated by technological advancements—the latest of the many crises in the troubled history of China’s entanglement with its script system and a century-long enterprise of national revival. This study is intended as an archaeology of how this crisis (re)emerged in the late 1970s and culminated in the first few years of the 1980s, how the old ideology of phonocentrism and the new wave of computer science informed and contested with each other, and how the series of dialogues between script reformists and engineers renegotiated the understanding of writing at the dawn of the Information Age. In particular, I seek to show that, following a shift from an ideologically informed anti-illiteracy movement to a scientifically driven campaign toward establishing new human-machine interfaces, ci [word] took over zi [character] as the major concern of scriptal modernization, during which the computer emerged as an actant that demands a retheorization of writing. I argue that, while the series of debates over scriptal modernization in this period were carried out in the familiar vocabulary of phonocentrism, Chinese scripts’ encounter with computer science in effect gave rise to a new ideology, characterized by what I shall call “phoneticization without phonè.”