Gjesteforelesning : Prof. Pak Yuha …
Gjesteforelesning: Prof. Pak Yuha (Sejong Universitet, S?r-Korea),"East Asia – Anti-Japanese Sentiments and Post-Nationalist Perspectives"
Tid: den 18. august 2008, 16:15 - 18:00.
Sted: Georg Sverdrups Hus, Undervisningsrum 1.
Sammendrag:
South Korean nationalism retains strong anti-Japanese tendencies, which hark back to the anti-colonial nationalism of the colonial days (1910-1945), but at the same time are being decisively formed by the particularity of South Korea’s post-colonial situation. The same may be said about China’s anti-Japanese sentiments, initially stirred up by the Japanese war of aggression (1937-1945), but now being influenced also by the specificity of China’s soci—political circumstances. In case of South Korea, it appears on the surface to be at odds with Japan, but in reality have sustained a special kind of mutually adhesive relationship since 1945, in which the colonial past itself has been deliberately forgotten. In this time, the reconstruction of memory with oneself as the basic unit of that reconstruction of the “past” has taken place within both Korea and Japan. In South Korea, the intensity of the anti-Japanese fervour was directly proportionate to the degree to which the country’s dependency on Japan and US had to be concealed. South Korea, for example, has been recently blaming Japan for the war-time sex slavery (“comfort women”), but there continue to be facilities of “comfort” around the US military bases, with very hard conditions for women working there. In South Korea too, just as with the Japanese right-wing, there is a strain of thought which commends giving ones life for the state. South Korea criticizes Japanese militarization while possessing itself one of the largest militaries in the world. In sum, the lecture will dwell on the ways how public domains of memory are being shaped by the current socio-political needs, and how putting the blame exclusively upon the external “enemy” legitimizes the existing internal power structures.
Prof. Pak Yuha: Professor, Department of Japanese Literature, Sejong University. She is the author of several books in Japanese and Korean, including Moving Beyond Anti-Japanese Korean Nationalism (in Korean, Sahwoe Pyungron Publishing, 2000; in Japanese, Kawade Shobo, 2005), Research on Natsume Soseki (in Korean, J&C, 2001), The Darkness of Modernity: The Silence of Literature (in Japanese, Sewoori Shobo, 2003), and National Identity and Gender: Natsume Soseki, Literature, Modernity (in Japanese, Crane 2007). Won 2007 Osaragijiro Award and several other awards in Japan.