SMLC Seminar
Intimate Empire

Dr. Nayoung Aimee Kwon
Associate Professor, Duke University

22 Apr 2015 (Wed)
4:30 - 6:00 pm
Room 4.36, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus HKU

This talk considers “intimate" cultural encounters between Korea and Japan during the colonial era (1910-1945) and their postcolonial erasure. After the Japanese empire’s collapse in 1945 at the behest of rising Cold War powers, new nation-centered histories in Korea and Japan actively erased these once ubiquitous cultural interactions that neither side wanted to remember. The shared but disavowed imperial encounter between proximate Asian neighbors and their contested legacies offers a case study to illuminate imperial relations in Asia. Through the case of the rise and repression of imperial subjects between the cultural fields of Korea and Japan, the talk examines imbrications of colonialism and modernity and the entwined legacies of colonial and Cold War histories in the Asia-Pacific more broadly.

Nayoung Aimee Kwon is an associate professor in Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Arts of the Moving Image and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Her research revolves around the study of empires past and present, and she is currently teaching and researching in China on a new project on the dilemmas of visibility and invisibility in (Post)Cold War visual cultures.