GUEST LECTURE ON APRIL 12, 12.15 TO 14.00: "How to Represent the Enemy during Civil War? The Cultural Depiction of the North and South Korean Other"
Dear all,
On April 12, 12.15 to 14.00, instead of our regular lecture, we are going to have a guest lecture by Dr. Jerome De Wit. (Universit?t Wien): "How to Represent the Enemy during Civil War? The Cultural Depiction of the North and South Korean Other". The original ordinary lecture for April 12, "South Korean Advertisements as a Form of Popular Culture", in reduced format (45 minutes), is to take place on April 19, together with another ordinary lecture, "Korean Food and the Global Ambitions of South Korean Gastronomic Nationalism." Dr. Jerome De Wit's guest lecture is a part of EPEL (The European Program for the Exchange of Lecturers), sponsored by Korea Foundation and administered by AKSE (Association for Korean Studies in Europe).
Abstract:
A depiction of an enemy other during war usually is very straightforward. Add some racist and even animalistic traits, and one has a ready-made mold with which to convince your population to support the war effort.
But how to depict an enemy when they are supposedly from the same ethnic nation? Is there a neat division possible between those in power oppressing the common population, and therefore claim the need to liberate them from under this evil rule? But is on the other hand not the vast majority of the people in the enemy’s society eagerly involved in the support and fight of the enemy state, which makes such a clear distinction untenable?
This lecture will present how North and South Korean artists and writers have grappled in their works with this paradoxical dilemma ever since the emergence of the two competing Korean states.
Lecturer's Bio
Jer?me de Wit is a Guest Professor in the Department of Korean Studies at the University of Vienna. He is a specialist on North and South Korean wartime literature and Korean-Chinese culture. His most recent project deals with the long-term effects of North and South Korean wartime literature on shaping narratives and the representation of the (North/South) Korean Other. He is furthermore pursuing a study on the constantly changing representations of identity in the literature, movies, and music of ethnic Koreans in China due to historical and social changes in Korean-Chinese society.