CEAPS Speaker Series - Jong Bum Kwon "Homeless, Abandoned: Affective Lives in Post-industrial South Korea"

Event Type

Seminar/Symposium

Topic

south korea

Sponsor

Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies

Location

1080 Foreign Languages Building - Lucy Ellis Lounge (707 S Mathews Ave., Urbana)

Date

Apr 6, 2018   12:00 - 1:30 pm  

Speaker

Jong Bum Kwon (Webster University)

Registration

Registration (lunch provided with registration)

Views

28

It’s been two decades since the disastrous Asian financial crisis; it’s been two decades since the dismantling of South Korea’s authoritarian, Fordist developmental regime. The ensuing decades have been broadly characterized as neoliberal, precarious, and compressed, as scholars have sought to capture the celerity and welter of social-cultural change related to stark economic inequality, casualization of employment, and deepened global connection. Much of the recent anthropological attention has focused on the broad category of youth (as emergent generations of loss), documenting the production of new subjectivities through their navigation of heightened competition, foreclosed social mobility, and illusory promises of global cosmopolitanism. This presentation aims to shift attention back to an earlier “lost generation” – predominantly male, industrial workers, who (as I have argued elsewhere) have become anachronisms in both public and scholarly imaginaries. Drawing upon recent anthropological thinking on post-Fordist affect and precarity I examine the particular articulations of loss, longing, and “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011) shared by Korea’s new primitives. My aim is to contribute to a comparative understanding of the effects and affects of deindustrialization, shedding light on non-Western experiences, to developing a more complex consideration of Korean working class masculinities, and to highlighting native Korean affective cultural forms. My presentation, then, explores under-studied dimensions of Korea’s neoliberal turn, emphasizing not the production of new subjectivities but strained attachments to the past.

 

Dr. Jong Bum Kwon is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Webster University.