[KS] 2023 MLA Convention, LLC Korean Forum Call for Papers

Hwang, Susan shwang1 at indiana.edu
Fri Mar 4 01:01:36 EST 2022


MLA LLC Korean Forum invites paper submissions for 2023 MLA Convention, to be held in San Francisco (Jan 5-8). Please see session details below. Shorter versions of the CFPs are also available on MLA's website. The submission deadline is March 10th. Thank you for your support and interest - please feel free to circulate and share the CFPs widely!

<Peninsular Predicaments: Post/Colonial Korea-Japan Textual Encounters>

Both realities on and representations of the Korean peninsula in the 20th century have been mediated to an overwhelming degree by Japanese imperialism and its aftereffects. While Korean writers living in colonial Chosŏn and postcolonial North and South Korea have retrospectively interrogated the psychosocial meanings and legacies of Japanese colonial occupation, the work of decolonization still remains an unfinished project, especially as concerns the diasporic Korean population across the Strait in Japan. Such postcolonial reckoning is further hindered by the taboo, still predominant in present-day North and South Korea, against Korean writings in Japanese for their purported contamination by pro-Japanese (ch’inil) sentiment. This panel therefore seeks to explore how textual interconnections on the Korean peninsula may aid our understanding of Korea’s postcolonial predicament. From the imperial gaze of Japanese travel monologues in the early twentieth century to quotidian narratives by Japanese residents in colonial Korea and writing produced in Japan by Korean intellectuals to postcolonial writings by Zainichi Korean residents of Japan, many have sought to render Korea’s necessarily transnational history under and after Japanese empire legible through literary representation. How do respective literary forms such as travel writing, autobiography, narrative fiction, or the modern epic differentially offer privileged media through which to understand this postcolonial experience? How does the work of literary translation – either as objective compulsion or internalized split subjectivity – alternatively facilitate or hinder our understandings of historical process and subject formation? What can the diverse writings in Japanese – the language both grammatically and geopolitically closest to Korean – tell us about the particularity of Korea’s postcolonial dilemma? Contributions from scholars working on any aspect of 20th century Korea-Japan textual interrelations in the fields of literature, history, and media are welcome. Please send a 250-word abstract and one-page C.V. to Kevin M. Smith (kevsmith at berkeley.edu) by March 10th, 2022.

<Critical Resonances: Sonic Culture in Modern and Contemporary Korea>

In recent years, innovative research in the humanities has sought to go beyond existing emphases on the textual and the visual by looking toward the sonic and aural dimensions of cultural production, socio-political practice, and historical experience. This panel draws upon such developments by focusing on the study of sound, soundscapes, and sonic culture in modern Korea. How does an emphasis on the aural, its contours, and its transformations change our understanding of modern Korea? How does it illuminate non-hegemonic forms of cultural and/or political practice? What does it tell us about communities and or experiences that have been marginalized from the canonical narrative of modern Korea history and identity? How have sonic forms of culture, practice, and experience interacted with and reshaped textual, visual, and embodied ones? Papers relating to any period of the modern and/or contemporary eras are welcome, as are papers that look beyond the Korean peninsula to consider transnational exchanges and/or Korean diasporic cultures. Potential topics may include: the use of sound or music as a political form; histories of the technical reproduction, transmission, or amplification of sound or music; the relationship between sound and text, touch, gesture, object, or image; the transformation of listening practices or other forms of sonic consumption; changing concepts of “noise”; the emergence of site-specific soundscapes or sound environments. Please send 250-word abstract and one-page CV by March 10th to Jon Kief (kief at unc.edu<mailto:kief at unc.edu>).

<The Working Conditions of Translation in Contemporary Korea>

South Korean fiction and film has experienced unprecedented exposure in the last decade, crowned by wins such as the International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian (Han Kang, 2016) and the Academy Awards and Golden Globe for Parasite (Bong Joon Ho, 2020). These successes have cast the limelight on those mediators of text: the translators. Translators have made it possible to overcome what Bong called the “one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles” and to embrace translation as “a selling point,” as Han’s translator Deborah Smith noted. One of the drivers of Korea’s dramatic rise as a “cultural superpower” in the field of literary translation are translation institutes and government-supported grants for translations. Their support of translators, unique in today’s global landscape, has transformed the working conditions of translation. Translation academies, writers’ festivals, and publishing grants are among the diverse government-funded activities. This panel is interested in exploring the relationship between institutionalized translation and the quickly transforming field of literary translation. Translation is no longer perceived as an invisible act that is solely interested in finding equivalences that reinforce existing conditions of exchange and static forms of knowledge. Rather, translation is increasingly thought of as a process that carries within it the radical potential to be transformative on both ends of the source and target languages and/or cultures. We ask: what are the conditions in which the cultural knowledge of Korea is translated? In what ways does translation enable new possibilities of encounter between languages and cultures? How has the institutionalization of translation facilitated or hindered the conditions within which we engage with translation as theoretical reckoning and practical work? How does translation help us problematize the national boundaries and identity-related postures (race, gender, and class) that impact the representation of minorities, and allow us the opportunity to think anew about the ethics of difference involved in such representation? Topics of interest may include the conditions in which translators work, translation as craft and translation as industry, translation as a mode of soft power, translation and the politics of representation, controversies in translation, translation and gender, intermedial translation, translation and adaptation, cinema and subtitling, etc. Please send a 250-word abstract and one-page CV to Dafna Zur (dafnaz at stanford.edu) and Susan Hwang (shwang1 at iu.edu) by 3/10/2022.


<Transpacific Imaginaries of Racial Apocalypse: Labor and Technology in the Age of the Pandemic>

Long CFP TBA

Inviting submissions on racial apocalyptic imaginaries related to pandemics, working conditions, or 'colorblind' technologies, addressed at the intersection of Asian American and Korean Studies. 250-word abstract and one-page CV to jinah.kim at csun.edu by 3/10/2022.


Susan Hwang

Assistant Professor of Korean Literature & Cultural Studies
Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures
School of Global & International Studies
Indiana University Bloomington
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