East Asian Intervention in the Cold War: Breaking the Cultural Codes of Race, History, Genre and Gender

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Scholarship on the Cold War in East Asia roused by the basic insight that, rather than one of “long peace,” the era was one of “hot” conflicts in the military, political and cultural realm throughout the region. This panel focuses on the cinema and media culture of East Asia and actively purses an understanding of the continuing complexities of the Cold War in the region. The papers here work through two vital critical interventions. First, that the Cold War era should not be limited to a unique historical period defined by the deterministically polar conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, but as a complex topographical dynamic of the national interior and the outside world. Second, that the Cold War in East Asia took place not only in the realm of ideology and politics but also in the concrete dimensions of lived spaces and everyday culture. The panel seeks to grapple with the peculiar nature of life during this period, in which global politics are re-envisioned in the everyday, the international becomes the intimate, history becomes loosened from chronology through the process of memory, and nation is reconfigured through the lens of gender. As suggested in the panel’s four papers, we seek to encourage the critical theorization of East Asian Cold War using inter-medial, multi-temporal, and transnational approaches that are nevertheless attuned to specific contingencies. Focusing mainly on materials from South Korea and Taiwan, two small but key nodes in the East Asian Cold War, the presentations will attempt to broach new global visions.

Area of Study

• Korea

Session Organizer

• Hyun Seon Park, Yonsei University

Chair

• Hyun Seon Park, Yonsei University

Individual Presentations

• The Family as Feeling: Bodies in Pain and the Re-embodiment of Edward Steichen’s Universal Everyday in Postwar South Korea - Jae Won Chung, Columbia University

• Exigency of History: Remembering Time to Come in the Cold War Korean Films - Hyun Seon Park, Yonsei University

• International Men of Mischief: Genre Play, Gender, and the 1960s Bonds of East Asia - Evelyn Shih, University of California, Berkeley

• Korean Male Body Project in the Cold War Era: Transnational Love Affair of 1960s Korean Films - Young-Jae Yi, Sungkyunkwan University

Discussant

• Steven Chung, Princeton University