Book Talk - Worm-Time: Memories of Division in South Korean Aesthetics

How can we understand the fiercely divided politics of contemporary South Korea without remembering the generational legacies of the unfinished Korean War? Worm-Time: Memories of Division in South Korean Aesthetics proposes a worm’s-eye view from which to historicize people’s experiences of survival, growth, and resistance under the shadow of anticommunist developmentalism. Among diverse cultural texts that recall the “wormification” of those deemed unpatriotic or unproductive, such as refugees, leftists, and their families, this book talk focuses on two: the woman novelist Park Wan-suh’s (1931–2011) autofictional works and the manhwa (comics) artist Yoon Taeho’s history webtoon of the mid-2010s. By comparing their aesthetic choices as they deal with Korea’s long postcolonial Cold War, the talk examines how each artist translates memories, corporeal or inherited, into a different medium, and what visions their practices of transmemory conjure to intervene into continuing wormification under the neoliberal world order.

 

 

We Jung Yi is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at Vanderbilt University. A specialist in modern Korean literature and culture, her research explores the intersection of global imperialism and ethnonational movements, using a comparative lens that draws on translation theory, gender criticism, and histories of violence in the Pacific Rim. In addition to Worm-Time: Memories of Division in South Korean Aesthetics, her work has appeared in the Journal of Korean Studies, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Korea Journal, Acta Koreana, and positions: asia critique. She is the co-editor of “Forgetting Wars,” a special issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias (Fall 2019). Yi is currently working on two intertwined book projects. One examines the Korean diaspora’s symbolic return through various media to their divided homeland, with the aim of developing transregional frameworks for migration in the Asia-Pacific region. The other historicizes Koreanized genres of excess, from sinp’a theater and comic strips of the early colonial period to the TV melodramas and post-apocalyptic webtoons that have gained transnational currency with the rise of hallyu.

 

Michelle Cho is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Korea and an Assistant Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies. Professor Cho’s research and teaching focus on questions of collectivity and popular aesthetics in Korean film, media, and popular culture. She has published on Asian cinemas and Korean wave television, video, and pop music in such venues as Cinema Journal, the International Journal of Communication, The Korean Popular Culture Reader, and Asian Video Cultures (2019 “Best Edited Collection” Award winner, Society for Cinema and Media Studies). Following from her first book, Genre Worlds: Global Forms and Millennial South Korean Cinema (forthcoming), which theorizes South Korean cinemas’ transnational dimensions through the concept of genre transference, her current work theorizes the convergence of platforms, affect, and globalization fantasies in Korean Wave contents and fandoms. She is developing two book projects based on this research, tentatively titled "Engendering the Korean Wave: National Gestures, Transmedia Forms and Vicarious Media: Serial Affect in K-pop Fandoms." Both projects approach South Korean television and internet video as an expanded, mediated public sphere, shaped by diasporic exchange and displaced national framing, to analyze how popular media manage the disjunctions between a fantasy of globalism/cosmopolitanism and the contradictions of uneven development. Vicarious Media focuses, in particular, on the discourses and performance practices generated by the K-pop boy group BTS.

Before coming to U of T, Professor Cho was a Korea Foundation Assistant Professor at McGill University. Prior to that, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow of International Humanities at Brown University, affiliated with the Departments of Modern Culture and Media and East Asian Studies.