[KS] CFP: The Cold War in Korean Cinemas Workshop

[Steven Chung]

CALL FOR PAPERS

“The Cold War in Korean Cinemas”
A KOVIC Workshop
Princeton University, May 7, 2016



We invite proposals from colleagues, independent scholars, and advanced graduate students for “The Cold War in Korean Cinemas,” a one-day workshop organized partly under the auspices of the Korean Visual Cultures Center (KOVIC) at Yonsei University. The workshop is conceived as a venue that brings together a small number of scholars interested in interdisciplinary approaches to Korean cinemas of the Cold War as a period, political formation, and discursive problem.



Papers presented at the conference will be developed and then considered for publication in a special issue of The Journal of Korean Studies, scheduled for print in Summer 2017. Its guest co-editors will be Steven Chung and Hyun Seon Park, who are also co-organizing the workshop.


Ideas about the Cold War have undergone radical revision over the past two decades on two general fronts. The first has been the variously triumphalist or nostalgic marking of the end of the “war” with the fall of the Soviet and East European regimes. The second was the long-standing notion of the Cold War as an ideological one, a primarily non-violent conflict of ideas structured by nuclear détente. The cinema and media cultures of Korea are particularly well-suited to giving the lie to these ideas and to advancing an understanding of the continuing complexities of the Cold War. From the late 1940s through to the present day, Korean cinemas on both sides of the divided peninsula have been saturated not only with the more easily palpable signs of national division but also with a range of subtler symptoms of ideological conflict. These are most salient in films produced at the height of the Cold War era, but are also traced in robust ways in very recent media productions and the policies that govern them. The ways in which Korean cinema and media cultures embody, push against, overturn and, perhaps most importantly, continue to foreground problems of the Cold War merit focused attention.


We welcome submissions that explore these areas. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

1. Cinema, ideology, and international power relations

•      propaganda films and occupation policies

•      postwar distribution of Hollywood films in Korea (1945-1950s)

•      technology and cultural education (film technologies, cartoons, travelogues, field trips)

2. Global cold war cinema protocols: anti-communism and modernisation

•      representation of north-south conflicts

•      biopolitics and sovereignty

•      violence, discipline, and genres

3. Mind, memory, and normalcy

•      brain-washing discourses and technics

•      psychology and knowledge production

•      the human and the monstrous

•      the demarcation of normalcy

•      trauma and representation

4. Topology and visuality

•      boundaries of interiority and exteriority

•      transnational or translation-al configuration

•      question of the invisual

•      ethics, aesthetics, and politics of the abject

Accommodations, all meals, and, under special circumstances, the cost of transportation will be covered for the workshop participants. Please submit a 300-word abstract and a brief biographical note by February 29, 2016 to workshop organizers Steven Chung (sychung at princeton.edu)<mailto:sychung at princeton.edu)> and Hyun Seon Park (hyunstime at yonsei.ac.kr)<mailto:hyunstime at yonsei.ac.kr)>.
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