[KS] [Zoom Talk] The Sensational Proletarian: Affect and Leftist Cultures in Colonial Korea [Jan 30, Friday]

[S Kim]

Dear friends and colleagues,

Please see the link below for an announcement of a Zoom talk hosted by the
Modern East Asian Literature Research Cluster at HKU. The Zoom time is in
Asia & US West Coast friendly zone. Registration is now open. Thank you!

Su Yun Kim
University of Hong Kong



*Modern East Asian Literature Research Cluster presents*

Emerging Research on Modern East Asian Literature

The Sensational Proletarian: Affect and Leftist Cultures in Colonial Korea


Speaker: Kimberly Chung

Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Korean Literary and Cultural
Studies | McGill University



Moderator: Su Yun Kim

Associate Professor in Korean Studies | The University of Hong Kong



DATE: 30 JAN 2026 (FRI) 10:00–11:30 am (HKT)

VENUE: ON ZOOM

REGISTRATION:

*https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=104269*
<https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=104269>

Visceral sensations, exaggerated affects, and suffering subjects
characterized leftist Korean cultural production in the 1920s and 1930s. In
popular fiction, print cartoons, reportage, cultural commentary, and other
emergent forms of mass culture, scenes detailing the spectacular bodily
harms endured by migrant workers, tenant farmers, factory workers, men,
women, and children proliferated. This talk focuses on these textual and
visual representations to tell the story of how the new affects and
everyday experiences introduced by imperial capitalism and colonial
modernity were mediated through the surface of the lower-class body. This
book traces the emergence of the “sensational proletarian” as a central
semantic figure of colonial Korean print culture and reads its varied
manifestations as emblematic of Korean cultural producers’ efforts to use
the sensations of the body to interpret and articulate the new political
ideology and imaginary of Marxism.



Kimberly Chung is Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Korean Literary
and Cultural Studies at McGill University. She received her PhD in
Comparative Literature from University of California, San Diego. Before
arriving at McGill, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hongik
University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Korea Institute of Harvard
University. She has published research on modern and contemporary Korean
literature, visual culture, and art in scholarly journals like “Journal of
Korean Studies” and “Acta Koreana” and was a special guest editor for the
issue “Sensibility and Landscape in Korean Literature and Film” for “Acta
Koreana” (Vol. 17 no.1, 2014)*. *She is a co-editor of an anthology on
Korean contemporary art titled *Korean Art From 1953: Collision, Innovation
and Interaction* (Phaidon Press, 2020). Her book *The Sensational
Proletarian: Leftist Cultures in Colonial Korea* was recently published in
July by Stanford University Press.

https://www.meal.hku.hk/post/the-sensational-proletarian-affect-and-leftist-cultures-in-colonial-korea
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