Cinematic Witnesses: Documenting Survival in East Asian Democracies

 

Our proposed film screening series “Cinematic Witnesses: Documenting Survival in East Asian Democracies” reflects on a number of broader trends illuminated by the recent political crisis in Korea. The declaration of martial law was not only a crisis of institutional democracy but the latest manifestation of colonialisms, militarized masculinity, hypercapitalist mediatization, and fascist modernity that have reverberated throughout East Asia from the Cold War to the present.

 

We ask through this series: What enables the synchronicity between democracy and martial law? What is the relationship between masculinity and sovereignty? What happens when we rethink martial law no longer as an exceptional event but as the modus operandi of colonialism–militarism? Featuring Professors Michelle Cho as discussant, Eilis Price-Peyroux (Ph.D. Student, East Asian Studies) as Moderator we aim to trouble the exceptionalization of the martial law crisis and open up a space for a critical examination of democracies throughout East Asia.

 

 

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.