Leaving Home: Feeling Asian Urban Spaces in Motion

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

The question of urban Asia in a constant state of mobility acquires new significance in this current age of active intra-regional exchanges of pan-Asian cultures as well as tensions and negotiations of historical past and present. Such movements and disparate forms of border-crossing have mutated through the continuous and disjunctive trajectories of Asian modern history. Patterns of border-crossings, whether it be personal or collective, fictional or real, literal or symbolic, with all its asymmetrical contours of the uneven times, become a metaphor for our own immediate condition.

This panel explores how the idea of border-crossing has been shaped and experienced within the historical contexts of Asia. Specifically, we will be examining how the concept of border-crossing and the "duality" of living in-between cultures are concretized in Asian urban spaces and how this could interact with the "structures of feeling." Spaces or architectures in urban Asia and affect are inextricably tied to one other and such entanglements visualize the transitory moments in time. This panel seeks to unravel the ways in which the embodied dispositions of emotions or feelings can be articulated through travels in time and space, and are transferred into new historical contexts in Asia. We will also look at how the emotional aspect of displacement becomes canonical and conventional, often outshining the emotive planes that are marked as personal or individual in everyday circumstances. We will re-articulate abstract accounts of transitory Asian urban spaces and displacements grounded in affect and offer different ways of making meaning around memories, relations, feelings, and movements of leave-taking.

Area of Study

• Northeast Asia

Session Organizer

• Hyunjung Lee, Nanyang Technological University

Chair

• Hyaeweol Choi, Australian National University

Individual Presentations

• Journeys that Never End: The Old Seoul Station as a Performative Space - Hyunjung Lee, Nanyang Technological University

• Navigating the Urban Space in Seoul: DDP as a Metaphoric Site of Korean Diaspora, Displacement, and Postmemory - Miseong Woo, Yonsei University

• Ethnicity and Masculinity in Shin-Okubo - Yukie Hirata, Dokkyo University

Discussants

• Hyaeweol Choi, Australian National University

• Leo Ching, Duke University