[KS] Ethnic and National Minorities in Korea (Emilia Szalkowska)

Thu May 8 03:56:55 EDT 2008

 Hello Emilia   Regarding your question about information on ethnic minorities in Korea, I know a bit about two groups in Korea that would fall under that category; migrant workers and international brides. I am currently beginning a research project on the media habits of Chinese, Filipino, Mongolian and Bengali migrant workers in Korea and I also work with Migrant Workers TV (www.mwtv.or.kr) in Seoul - an organization made up of migrants from various nationalities that produces news and tv documentary programs in 10 different languages. Please email me at robprey at yahoo.ca to let me know what you are particularly interested in and I may be able to put you in contact with some organizations and pass on some information of interest. 

  All the best 
  Robert Prey 

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<<------------ KoreanStudies mailing list DIGEST ------------>>

Today's Topics:

1. Re: korean studies at the university of california in
jeopardy (J.Scott Burgeson)
2. Question on K.H. Lindholm (collector) (Christian Lewarth)
3. Ethnic and national minorities in Korea (Emilia Szalkowska)
4. There a Petal Silently Falls (Theodore Hughes)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 23:33:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: "J.Scott Burgeson" 
Subject: Re: [KS] korean studies at the university of california in
jeopardy
To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
Message-ID: <83396.45317.qm at web51005.mail.re2.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

--- On Fri, 4/25/08, gkl1 at columbia.edu wrote:

> Many people in Korea and in the
> overseas Korean communities tend 
> to see the existence of Korean Studies in the
> universities of the world as a
> validation of their worth and importance, but give little
> attention to the work we produce.

Although I received my undergraduate degree from UCB in English and Rhetoric, I have only a tangential point to make vis a vis the present topic at hand. As an independent critic unaffiliated with any academic institutions myself, I have also found Prof. Ledyard's statement above to be true, albeit with slightly different implications as far as my own work is concerned. In my dealings with Korea-based foundations here in Seoul over the years, both public and private, there seems to be little recognition that Western critics covering Korean culture also deserve some support, be it through language-study grants or publication assistance. If you are a critic (or even scholar) but are not with a graduate program somewhere or do not have an advanced degree, you simply are not taken seriously by grant-giving foundations here. But the fact of the matter is that it is almost impossible for a non-Korean critic to make a decent living writing about Korean culture
for English-speaking readers. Thus, the lack of public or private grant assistance for Western critics covering Korean culture means that it is difficult to find commenters on Korean culture in the popular English-language press who actually know what they're talking about (or who are not simply hacks). I feel this is a short-sighted strategy and when you get right down to it, is not really based on lack of financial resources on the part of Korea-based foundations, but is simply based on some sort of irrational or status-linked prejudice that because you do not have an advanced degree behind your name, you are simply not useful as a tool that can be used in the cause of "validating the worth and importance" of Korean international prestige in the way that only institutions of higher learning apparently can (yes, this last statement is meant to be sarcastic).
I remember when I interviewed the Japanese director Suzuki Seijun in Tokyo nearly ten years ago, the staff at the Japan Foundation were extremely happy to hear about my work and went out of their way to provide stills from his films to print in my magazine at no cost to myself. They did not care whether I had a degree behind my name or not, but were simply pleased that I was helping to promote Japanese culture to an English-speaking readership -- and I might note that an extremely transgressive director Suzuki is hardly a "respectable" standard-bearer of Japanese culture. My interactions with the Korea Foundation have been, well, in the interests of being diplomatic, quite the opposite. Perhaps I am burning bridges by posting this kind of message to the List, but since I gave up applying for grants here many years ago, I know that it will not affect me one way or the other so I really don't care anymore.
There are many reasons why Korean culture is and shall continue to remain relatively obscure on the world stage, and my experiences as an independent critic here are just one more example of why this is so.
--Scott Bug

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Message: 2
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 07:02:27 +0000 (GMT)
From: Christian Lewarth 
Subject: [KS] Question on K.H. Lindholm (collector)
To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
Message-ID: <263550.43814.qm at web26001.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

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Message: 3
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:03:22 +0900
From: "Emilia Szalkowska" 
Subject: [KS] Ethnic and national minorities in Korea
To: "Korean Studies Discussion List" 
Message-ID: <002a01c8a6a2$7716e100$687ba8c0 at emilia>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Male beauty in KoreaDear colleagues,

I'm curious about the situation of ethnic/national minorities in Korea. One of the strongest traits of Korea as a nation - its homogeneity seems to be already not the case. I would like to compare minorities' life in Korea and in Poland. If anyone knows of an article, book or other publication concerning this issue (statistics, legal regulations concerning the rights of the national minorities in the Republic of Korea, associations of minorities, etc.) and could pass to me, I would be very grateful for your help.

Emilia Szalkowska
Department of Polish Studies
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Korea
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Message: 4
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:56:00 -0400
From: Theodore Hughes 
Subject: [KS] There a Petal Silently Falls
To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
Message-ID: <20080425095600.2lvhctyr7ggsso8w at cubmail.cc.columbia.edu>
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Dear list members,

For anyone who might be in the New York City area in early May, the 
Korea Society is holding a book launch for Ch'oe Yun's short story 
collection There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch'oe Yun, 
translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. Ch'oe Yun and the translators 
will speak at the book launch on May 9. There a Petal Silently Falls 
is the first single-authored collection of stories by a Korean writer 
published by Columbia University Press. For more
information on the upcoming event, please visit 
http://www.koreasociety.org/contemporary_issues/contemporary_issues/book_cafe_there_a_petal_silently_falls.html and/or see the descriptions of the text 
below.

Sincerely,

Ted Hughes

>From Publishers Weekly:

There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch'oe Yun Ch'oe Yun, 
trans. from the Korean by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. Columbia Univ., 
$24.50 (208p) ISBN 978-0-231-14296-0

Stories within stories unfold in the title novella: a brother 
?disappears,? a mother grieves, a daughter witnesses her mother's 
death; consequent traumatic events leave the daughter 
self-destructive. The novella is haunting, painful and affirming, full 
of illusions and hallucinations while rooted in the graphically 
physical. In ?Whisper Yet,? a woman's thoughts about her daughter 
alternate with a story from her own childhood that she's never told 
anyone before, a device through which three generations and two Koreas 
coexist. In ?The Thirteen-Scent Flower,? the world is one that slides 
deftly from fable to satire as a truck driver who dreams of becoming 
?a denizen of the Arctic? crosses paths with a suicidal teenage girl 
with a preternaturally green thumb. Everything about Yun's work is 
brilliant. (May)

>From Columbia University Press:

There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch'oe Yun, translated
by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton

Ch'oe Yun is a Korean author known for her breathtaking versatility,
subversion of authority, and bold exploration of the inner life.
Readers celebrate her creative play with fantasy and admire her deep
engagement with trauma, history, and the vagaries of remembrance.

In this collection's title work, There a Petal Silently Falls, Ch'oe
explores both the genesis and the aftershocks of historical outrages
such as the Kwangju Massacre of 1980, in which a reported 2,000
civilians were killed for protesting government military rule. The
novella follows the wanderings of a girl traumatized by her mother's
murder and strikes home the injustice of state-sanctioned violence
against men and especially women. "Whisper Yet" illuminates the harsh
treatment of leftist intellectuals during the years of national
division, at the same time offering the hope of reconciliation between
ideological enemies. The third story, "The Thirteen-Scent Flower,"
satirizes consumerism and academic rivalries by focusing on a young
man and woman who engender an exotic flower that is coveted far and
wide for its various fragrances.

Elegantly crafted and quietly moving, Ch'oe Yun's stories are among
the most incisive portrayals of the psychological and spiritual
reality of post-World War II Korea. Her fiction, which began to appear
in the late 1980s, represents a turn toward a more experimental,
deconstructionist, and postmodern Korean style of writing, and offers
a new focus on the role of gender in the making of Korean history.

End of Koreanstudies Digest, Vol 58, Issue 30
*********************************************

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