[KS] The 97th Yonsei-KF Korean Studies Forum (Hyuk-Rae Kim, Yonsei University)

[Yonsei-KF Korean Studies Forum]

The Korean Studies Program and the Korea Foundation would like to
invite you to attend the 97th Yonsei-KF Korean Studies Forum.

Title: "What Happened to North Korea's Korean War Fallen Soldiers?"
Speaker: Heonik Kwon, Reader in Anthropology, London School of Economics
Date: THURSDAY, November 26
Time: 6 p.m.
Location: Room 702, New Millennium Hall, Yonsei University

No RSVP required. For directions, please refer to
http://gsis.yonsei.ac.kr/html/content.asp?code=001007.

Questions? Contact kimhall at yonsei.ac.kr

This will be our last forum of the semester until May 2010.
We hope to see you on the 26th of November.

Sincerely,

Hyuk-Rae Kim
hyukrae at yonsei.ac.kr
Professor of Korean Studies
Graduate School of International Studies
Yonsei University

biography | Heonik Kwon is Reader in Anthropology at the London School
of Economics and taught previously at the University of Edinburgh and
University of Manchester. He is the author of the prize-winning After
the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai
(California, 2006, Clifford Geertz prize) and Ghosts of War in Vietnam
(Cambridge, 2008, George Kahin prize). His new book is The
Decomposition of the Cold War (Columbia, 2010).

abstract | The cemeteries of the fallen soldiers, together with the
Tomb of Unknown Soldier, are important material and symbolic objects
in the history of modern political life and public aesthetics. This is
evident not only in Europe and North America, but also in many parts
of the non-Western postcolonial world. North Korea is a striking
exception to this fairly universal modern culture of war
commemoration. No publicly known national cemeteries of fallen
soldiers exist in North Korea, despite the fact that the country
experienced one of the most violent wars of the past century - the
Korean War (1950-1953) - as part of the global Cold War and during its
formative era. The lecture will explore North Korea's culture of
commemoration, questioning how the country's political order could
sustain the devastating effects of a modern total war without
resorting to what George Mosse calls the cult of the fallen soldiers.