This talk is based on the book, Mediating the Korean Other: Representations and Discourses of Difference in the Post/Neocolonial Nation-Stat (Univesity of Michigan Press, 2022), edited by David Oh.
March 10, 2023 | 2:00PM – 4:00PM
Location: Room 208N, Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto.
Register here.
The book talk addresses the ways in which alterity is mediated in South Korean popular culture. With Korea’s complicated postcolonial legacy with Japan and its neocolonial relationship with the United States, the Korean ethnoscape is produced through a negotiation between various ways of understanding difference: its own indigenous notions of difference, its incorporation and resistance to Japanese notions of difference, and its interpretations of U.S. and Western racial hierarchy. Although racial frames have been applied to the study of Korea and its sensemaking around difference, this book talk argues that doing so is reductive and problematically asserts Western-centrism by applying a Western framework to understand non-Western spaces. Thus, drawing on a postcolonial ethos, Dr. Oh argues that to understand alterity and its mediation in South Korea, it is important to take seriously indigenous epistemologies.
Organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea at the Asian Institute and co-sponsored by the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto.
