For non-Columbia affiliates, registration is required to access the Morningside campus. Registering will generate an email with a QR code which must be presented along with a government-issued ID (your name must match exactly the name registered for the event) at either 116 Street & Broadway or 116 Street & Amsterdam gates for entry. Please register using an unique email address (one email address per registrant) by Feb. 25 at 4:00 pm for campus access.
An email with the QR code from CU Guest Access will be sent before or on the day of the event.
Speaker: Pil Ho Kim, Associate Professor of Korean Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University
Moderator: Jae Won Chung, Assistant Professor of Korean Literature, Rutgers University
Join us for a book talk on Korean cultural history that bridges the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. In Polarizing Dreams, Pil Ho Kim presents South Korea’s Gangnam-style urban development as a unique case of cultural globalization in the age of social polarization. He will start with the novelist Cho Sehŭi’s ecocriticism of Chamsil, an integral part of Gangnam, which used to be a sandy beach on the Han River before the construction of reinforced concrete high-rise apartments. Following Cho’s lead, this talk will explore the ferroconcrete dreams of Han River development, paying particular attention to the materiality of urban construction represented by the concrete infrastructure and buildings along the southern banks of the Han. As a counterpoint to Cho’s ecocriticism, the photographer Young June Lee finds “desolate beauty” (sangmangmi) in the same concrete-laden landscape, singing the praises of urban infrastructure that bears the weight of “the modern world on its shoulders” and without which, indeed, everything would return to sand.
Speaker's Bio: Pil Ho Kim is Associate Professor of Korean Studies at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Polarizing Dreams: Gangnam and Popular Culture in Globalizing Korea (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024). His next book project investigates the trans-Pacific cultural impact of Black freedom movements on modern Korean history.
This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and co-sponsored by the Center for Korea Research.
Registration:
- To attend this event in-person, please register HERE.
- To attend this event online, please register HERE.
