Korea
The Council on East Asian Studies is pleased to present the 3rd Seong-Yawng Park GRD ‘65 and Marguerite Clark Park Memorial Lecture. Lecture will take place from 4:00PM to 5:30PM in Henry R. Luce Hall Auditorium, followed by a reception in Luce Common Room from 5:30PM to 6:30PM. Are women’s experiences of Buddhism different from those of their male counterparts? Can Buddhism offer new directions in women’s search for identity and freedom? Or, to put it broadly, why and how do women engage with Buddhism in modern times? This presentation explores these issues through an examination of the...
This session will cover McCune-Reischauer Korean romanization system, word division, and hands-on practice. You will be able to understand the basic rules of Korean romanization following this session. Korean Romanization Workshop Series 2pm-3pm (EST), October 8, 15, and 22 The Korea Collection at the East Asia Library at Yale presents a series of three online workshop sessions on Korean romanization. From introduction and basic rules to the advanced will be covered by Korean Studies librarians who are specialized in Korean romanization and cataloging. Students and researchers in Korean...
South Korea has long been known as the “plastic surgery capital of the world” with the highest rates of plastic surgery per capita globally. In this talk, I ask how cosmetic surgery becomes normalized as economically and socially viable? And, how does this normalization get disrupted? I argue that feminist abstraction is one method through which cosmetic surgery, and Korean beauty more broadly, is sold in contemporary global Korean cultural products such as K-pop and K-dramas. Feminist abstraction codes contemporary beauty regimes as resistance and in so doing, normalizes beauty regiments as...
Jude Yang, Librarian for Korean Studies, will present an overview of the Korea Collection and highlight its Korean Studies collections and resources. (A limited, light lunch will be served)
A Korean ghetto existed in every large Japanese city in the early postwar period, and up to the late 1960s. These ghettos provoke the same images and associations in the memory of most Japanese: isolation, poverty, filth, danger. To many scholars the existence of ghettos confirms the transwar continuity of Japanese oppression of underclass ethnic minorities. But Koreans who grew up in ghettos, or tongne, often offer spectacular, heroic narratives about life there. This presentation switches the focus from Japanese society to zainichi or resident Koreans themselves, and discusses the...
In the aftermath of Europe’s empires, linguistic continuities such as Anglophone and Francophone writings emerged as bona fide, albeit controversial, cultural legacies and fields of inquiry. A robust production and consumption of such writings and critical debates gave rise to writers and literary works that circulated widely albeit unevenly through global debates on World Literature and Postcolonial Studies. In the case of the Japanese empire, there exists a significant body of literary works that emerged from linguistic comings and goings across imperial borderlines that persisted long...
Interested in becoming an East Asian Languages & Literatures or East Asian Studies Major? Come for an informal get-together with the DUS for EALL and the DUS for EAST! Please RSVP to eastasian.studies@yale.edu by October 28th. For more information, please contact...
From the Park Chung-hee syndrome to the contentious debates surrounding the legislation to deal with “pro-Japanese collaborators” of the colonial period and the rise of the New Right the textbook controversy, South Korea in the last two decades has been waging internecine struggles so fierce and contentious, it has been called a civil war, tout court. These debates reveal that Korean society is deeply divided over how centrally their country’s history of overcoming the colonial and authoritarian past should underlie current political consciousness and a vision for the future. Should South...
Lunch will be served. This talk focuses on the rural-to-urban transformation of South Korean society in the 1960s and 1970s, looking at the growth of informal communities and shantytowns in and around the capital Seoul. A focus on these peripheralized and subaltern communities highlights new aspects of state-led developmentalism absent from our current literature, demonstrating how the promises of the Park Chung Hee government (1961-1979) opened up new and often unexpected spaces for social and political action even as officials attempted to impose a regime of discipline over urban space. I...
Lunch will be served. Japan’s 1882 Criminal Code stopped recognizing concubines as family members, but the household registration (koseki) continued to record children born to concubines under fathers’ registries until 1942. During this time, Japanese family law divided offspring into three groups: (1) legitimate children (chakushi) born to married couples, (2) children by concubines (shoshi) listed on fathers’ registries, and (3) illegitimate children (shiseishi) without paternal recognition listed on maternal family registries. This trifold categorization, as opposed to a legitimate-...
Historical and contemporary movements of people, goods, and cultural meanings that have defined Asia as a region. Reexamination of state-centered conceptualizations of Asia and of established boundaries in regional studies. The intersections of transregional institutions and local societies and their effects on trading empires, religious traditions, colonial encounters, and cultural fusion. Finance flows that connect East Asia and the Indian Ocean to the Middle East and Africa. The cultures of capital and market in the neoliberal and postsocialist world.
In 1939, Japan passed the Film Law to mobilize cinema in the empire’s war efforts, and the colonial government in Korea continued moving toward total control of the domestic culture industry. From such political turns, Korean filmmakers and producers found both perils and opportunities in the film business. Korean cinema was on the verge of losing its ethnic ground, as it was to be incorporated into the empire’s greater film sphere; at the same time, the national cinema’s crisis presented an opportunity for colonial filmmakers to explore a larger film market ensured by the empire’s expansion...
Dictator’s Modernity Dilemma: Development and Democracy in South Korea, 1961-1987 aims to reconcile the two seemingly contradictory views regarding Korea’s path to modernity and democracy. At first blush, South Korea illustrates the basic premise of modernization theory: economic development leads to democracy. However, under Park Chung Hee (1961-1979) and Chun Doo Hwan (1980-1988), Korea’s political system became increasingly authoritarian alongside the growth of the national economy. These South Korean autocrats sought legitimacy of their coup-born regimes by holding legislative elections...
The Council on East Asian Studies is pleased to present the 2nd Seong-Yawng Park GRD ’65 and Marguerite Clark Park Memorial Lecture. Lecture will take place from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM in the Amphitheater Room 101 at Henry R. Luce Hall, followed by a reception in Luce Common Room from 5:30 PM to 6:15 PM. Militarism has been deeply intertwined with Korean history and South Korean economic development, especially under the government of Park Chung Hee, who seized political control of the country in an army coup in 1961 and remained in power until his assassination in 1979. In his ongoing...
The 5th Yale-Ewha Conference invites a group of eight scholars working on the interconnection of life, medicine, and religion in Korea and Southeast Asia. Following upon last year’s conference which focused on ecology and environmental issues, this conference turns to the topic of life, religion, and medicine. Special attention will be given to the following issues: how religions define the word “life as well as the meaning of life; the ethical frameworks religions develop for living this life; the ways in which religions exhort human beings to understand their existence; what religions...
At a time when Korean Studies scholarship seems intent on “interrogating,” “contesting,” “asserting,” and “problematizing,” it has become all too easy to lose sight of the millennia-old Korean literary tradition and its potential for continuing to inform Korean cultural expression in the new millennium. In this presentation I wish to emphasize the powers of endurance of a literary tradition that is equal parts oral, local, lyric, and performative on the one hand, and recorded (primarily in Chinese until the modern era), cosmopolitan, and conceptual on the other. The Korean literary tradition...
This presentation discusses the relationship between human emotions and slavery in Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) by examining legislative processes as well as private practices concerning the status of the offspring of a yangban man and his slave-status concubine. The legislative discussions and decisions on the topic at the royal court often subscribed to the notion that these children were also the yangban’s “flesh and blood” and called for compassion, a Confucian emotional norm expected of parents. When yangban fathers manumitted their slave-status children, they recorded their feelings in the...
The Council on East Asian Studies is pleased to present the Inaugural Seong-Yawng Park GRD ’65 and Marguerite Clark Park Memorial Lecture North Korea is the land of punditry, controversy and bad intelligence. Policy debates swirl in Washington over how U.S. policy should address this foreign policy challenge. Much of these debates is informed by a mix of opinion, ideology and politics. How do we make sense of it all? Dr. Cha and his Beyond Parallel microsite at CSIS try to cut through the noise to bring data to the study of North Korea and foreign policy. He will discuss five data...
The Korean Buddhist nun and movie director Ven. Daehae will be presenting the screening of her film “The Sermon on the Mount” (2017), winner of three awards at Russia’s Cheboksary International Film Festival. The film shares the story of eight young Koreans meeting together in a cave to seek the truth about Jesus’ teachings. After the showing, Ven. Daehae will answer questions from the audience.
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