Korea
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SEOUL TRAIN - The gripping documentary by Incite Productions, Inc. into the life and death of North Koreans as they try to escape their homeland This special screening of SEOUL TRAIN will be followed by a Q&A session with Director/Producer Jim Butterworth - Co-founder & Co-principal, Incite Productions, Inc.; M.B.A., Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth Moderated by Dr. Jinhee Choi - Postdoctoral Associate, Council on East Asian Studies at Yale SEOUL TRAIN, with its riveting footage of a secretive “underground railroad,” delves into the complex geopolitics behind this growing and...
Dr. Cohen will speak briefly about her research on empire and its collapse focusing on the Japanese settler community of Korea, 1876-1946. In addition to speaking about how she arrived at this topic, a little about the project itself, and the scholarship that informs her methodological and theoretical interests, Nicole Cohen will discuss her future research agenda.
The Council is pleased to present the 47th Annual Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture. Benjamin Elman is Professor of East Asian Studies and History at Princeton University, with East Asian Studies as his primary department. His teaching and research fields include Chinese intellectual and cultural history, 1000-1900; the history of science in China, 1600-1930; the history of education in late imperial China; and Sino-Japanese cultural history, 1600-1850. He received his Ph.D. in Oriental Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (1980) and came to Princeton in 2002 from the University of...
Hereditary slavery, both private and public, was central to the economy of Chosôn Korea prior to the nineteenth century, and the members of the slave, or nobi, class were subject to a host of special laws regarding sales, inheritance of offspring, recapture, and retribution against masters, among others. This body of laws was developed outside the orthodox canon of laws inherited from China, which had few direct parallels. Drawing upon legal case books, contemporary diaries, and central government records, this talk will examine the legal plight of female slaves, who were not only subject to...
Come and celebrate the Year of The Pig!
This presentation examines the mise-en-scene of some contemporary Korean horror films with a focus on the externalization of character psychology as manifest in a decorative impulse.
One of the results of the Arabic conquest of Central Asia at the beginning of the 8th century was the inclusion of the Central Asian elites and armies in the Muslim empire. Their influence there was important, as the Muslim world was twice conquered by them, first in 750 then in 811. But their specific social background is mainly known from Chinese sources as these Sogdian and Turkish armies were described in the Chinese histories. These elites and armies were active in Northern China before the Arabic conquest, so that to understand their background we have to compare Arabic and Chinese...
The peripheral status of Asian football in the global order of the world sport is rooted in the historical experience of military, political and economic dominance of the West. Since football reached the Far East at a time when European colonialism was giving way to growing US American influence in the region, it never acquired significant meaning in the relationship between the West and the East. However, within the postcolonial world of the North Pacific, football has become a powerful cultural resource for representational purposes. In my presentation I will take a look at the way in which...
The conference focuses on one principal characteristic of contemporary Korean cinema: Korean cinema’s reliance upon excessive affective responses from the viewer. According to some scholars, the emotional payoffs in classical Hollywood cinema are the by-products of compelling, causally-tight storytelling. Contemporary Korean cinema seems to offer a counterexample. From the so-called “Asian Extreme” cinema of Kim Ki-duk’s sensationalist films to Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy, from popular genre films to Korean TV mini-series dramas such as Winter Sonata, priority seems to be given...
Hereditary slavery, both private and public, was central to the economy of Chosôn Korea prior to the nineteenth century. The most common and effective technique of resistance by members of the slave, or nobi, class was flight to another locale, where one’s social status could be effectively transformed into that of a free commoner. On occasion escaped slaves were able to create their own, separate communities in isolated locales, such as coastal islands, well beyond the reach of easy recapture. This talk will examine the dynamics of slave flight and recapture from the seventeenth to the...
OPENING RECEPTION at 5:30 PM TWO DAY WEEKEND CONFERENCEWe welcome your attendance at an interdisciplinary workshop to explore how Asian religions have conceptualized and utilized the natural world. Our general aim is to explore in various ways how religious communities interacted with their natural environment and what effect this interaction might have had on art, narrative, and doctrine. Participants Include: James Benn (McMaster University) Robert Brown (University of California, Los Angeles) Veronique Bouillier (CNRS Paris) Gerard Colas (CNRS Paris) Jacob Dalton (Yale University)...
The Council on East Asian Studies, Yale-China Association, Richard U. Light Fellowship Program Conversations and student presentations on 2005 summer travel, study, internships, and research in Greater China, Japan, and Korea.
The history of modern Korean politics can be characterized as the history of the clash of alternative conceptions of modernity as articulated by various intellectuals, activists, and politicians in the wake of the fall of the Confucian Choson Dynasty in 1910. The five most influential conceptions were (, and still are): Pro-Chinese Confucian traditionalism, Pro-Japanese Modern Reformism, Pro-American Christian Reformism, Pro-Soviet Socialism/Communism, and Ethnic Nationalism. This presentation will delineate the historical and socio-political contexts in which the different conceptions of...
In this essay Professor Swaner concentrates on South Korea’s most significant 1980’s laborer and activist turned poet - Pak Nohae (1957- ). Moving from an analysis of the 1980s (Korea’s “Decade of Poetry”) as the context for the emergence of the young “worker’s poet (nodong siin),” He examines Pak’s straightforward, architectonically simple, and even naïve poetic style in order to evaluate its significance and trace its connections with the early stages of late capitalism in Korea. The intellectual questions raised revolve around the debates between Modernism and Realism and the efficacy of...
The East Asian economy is rapidly developing. This is the main area where outsourcing from developed countries is directed. On the other hand, international relations among China, South Korea, and Japan are in delicate, if not vulnerable, balance, even though we do not mention the role of North Korea. This academic year we fortunately have three different courses on the economy of China, Korea and Japan. The following roundtable discussion will present the current situations of the economies of China, South Korea and Japan and dialogues about the political economic interactions among East...
This lecture addresses the South Korean path to modernity closely interwoven with Cold War politics and militarization. In particular, approaching modernity as a “key word” (a la Raymond Williams) whose meaning is not entirely fixed, Professor Moon examines the gendered making and remaking of membership in the modern nation. Initially, the Korean state massively mobilized women and men to be dutiful members of the nation and in the process constructed women as reproducers /marginal producers and men as soldiers/producers. An unintended consequence of such gendered mobilization by military...
Many of the commercial shaman shrines on the periphery of Seoul claim both auspicious sites and long traditions, but in fact, their histories are histories of movement rather than fixity. The rapid growth and expansion of the city of Seoul, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century, has resulted in a landscape where little seems permanent or even very old. This paper describes the recent peregrinations shrines and argues that the open, visionary possibilities of shamanic practice make it possible for shrine-keepers and their adherents to reconstitute venerable shrines in new...
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