Creation of New Networks of Plural Identities : Learning from the History of Early Globalization

Hiroko Sakamoto Ewha Institute for the Humanities, Ewha Womans Uni 2009 탈경계인문학 Vol.1 No.-

Globalization always accompanies nationalism even though they look like mutually exclusive. Even in East Asia, in the era of so-called “early globalization,” with the global spread of racism and social Darwinism, people began to categorize human beings into “white, civilized, and superior races” and “colored, uncivilized, and inferior races,” and then ethnic minorities came to be looked down and discriminated against by the majority everywhere especially under colonial rule. In Japan minor aborigines such as Ainu people who were formally recognized as an indigenous ethnic group only in June 2008 by the Japanese Diet and Ryukyu people in Okinawa, had an unhappy encounter with each other by being displayed along in the Human Race Pavilion at the 5th National Industrial Exposition, an imperialist exhibition held in 1903. It is important to understand that Japan is a multiethnic country containing heterogeneous ethnic people who can dissimilate nationalistic discourse. And it would be dangerous to pursue only one ethnic or national identity exclusively to close the doors to plural identities. Our route of life is more important than our roots. It would be better to create new networks of plural identities, instead of reconstructing an update “Human Race Pavilion.”

Preserving Culture, Producing Culture : UNESCO’s Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expression

Grewal, Inderpal Ewha Institute for the Humanities, Ewha Womans Uni 2009 탈경계인문학 Vol.1 No.-

The 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expression is an important project for rescuing cultural practices that are believed to be under attack by transnational corporations and a predatory globalization. However, the process of saving these practices and expressions by means of the UNESCO and its organizations will inevitably alter these practices and expressions, changing them from one cultural form to another that is marked by its transnational rescue.

The Development of Multiculturalism Discourse and Multicultural Policy in South Korea : With a Focus on the Roles of the Government and Civil Society

Yoon, In-Jin Ewha Institute for the Humanities, Ewha Womans Uni 2009 탈경계인문학 Vol.1 No.-

Since 2000, the issues of multiculturalism and multicultural society have been actively discussed and debated in Korean society. This article categorizes multiculturalism discourses in Korean society into “state-led multiculturalism” and “citizen-led multiculturalism” and examines their backgrounds, main contents, and strengths and weaknesses. To analyze the contents of “state-led multiculturalism,” this paper examines the policies and laws related to foreigners and immigrant brides as proposed by the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, and the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development. To analyze the contents of “citizen-led multiculturalism,” this paper examines the activities and viewpoints of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that carry out multicultural programs for foreign migrant workers and foreign brides who have married Koreans. Results show that the Korean government’s multicultural policy is not a policy of multiculturalism, but rather a multiculture-oriented policy which is very assimilationist in essence. Also, the Korean government’s multicultural policy is not entirely “state-led” or “citizen-led” but more or less a “policy network” between the government and NGOs. As a policy recommendation, this paper proposes “stepwise multiculturalism” to combine the ideals of citizen-led multiculturalism and the practicality of state-led multiculturalism.

Race and the National Body

Samuels, Shirley Ewha Institute for the Humanities, Ewha Womans Uni 2010 탈경계인문학 Vol.2 No.-

This essay uses the concept of translation to examine the relation of lterity to cultures of violence in late twentieth century visual and literary enactments. I proceed by looking at women artists and writers working mostly in the United States. Within this essay, the main examples of a relation between translation and representation will be drawn from the artist Kara Walker and the writer Toni Morrison. Early allusions to artists such as Renee Cox and writers such as Louise Erdrich and Maxine Hong Kingston work to establish relations between languages and cultures and the representational status of the female body. The works produced by these women emphatically stage problematic, sometimes cross-species reproduction and sexual violence as the conceptual problems for women as they retell complex histories in allegorical terms.

The Power of Social Imaginaries : Fact, Fiction, and the Politics of Knowledge

Code, Lorraine Ewha Institute for the Humanities, Ewha Womans Uni 2010 탈경계인문학 Vol.2 No.-

In this paper I read Nadine Gordimer’s novel July’s People to illustrate some of the myriad complexities of knowing people responsibly and well across racial and other differences. The phrase “they treated him well” is emblematic in showing the incapacity of white liberal discourse to capture the dehumanizing and patronizing effects of how the novel’s white protagonists have engaged, in their town life, with their black servant, July. Drawing on the work of Ofelia Schutte, Miranda Fricker, and Judith Butler, among others, the paper addresses questions about alterity, and the politics of unknowing, as these issues complicate the lives of the white folks, and of July himself and the people of his village, in their new-found interdependence. Questions about recognition and mis-recognition, about the power of narrative and the poverty of liberal thinking, are germane to the analysis, as are issues to do with “natural kinds” and assumptions about human sameness. The paper argues for a creative rethinking of incommensurability and relativism en route to developing a viable epistemology for engaging knowledgeably and critically with oppressive social-political practices

‘Zainichi’ Who? : The Other Who Cannot Move across Borders

Suh, Kyungsik Ewha Institute for the Humanities, Ewha Womans Uni 2010 탈경계인문학 Vol.2 No.-

‘Zainichi’ is the Japanese way of pronouncing the Chinese characters ‘在 日,’ which is ‘재일’ (Jae-il) in Korean which means ‘residing in Japan.’ Yet the psychoanalytic discussion on the jargon term Zainichi enables us to consider the boundaries which surround ethnic Koreans residing in Japan. ‘재일조선인’ (Jae-il Chosun-in), pronounced ‘Zainichi Chosenjin’ in Japanese, are refugees usually confined in the enclosed space of Japan. Yet the word ‘confined’ is not limited merely to that of a geographical and/or a political sense. They have been forced to experience themselves being separated from their ‘native community’ as well as being continuously ‘other-ized’ by the majority of Japanese society. It has caused them to be confined by the ‘boundaries of identity.’ For the second and third generation Jae-il Chosun-in born in Japan after World War II, the aforementioned situation brought about a severe identity crisis. To overcome this schizophrenic situation, they endeavored to travel to their ‘motherland’ (the native land of their antecedents) and massociate with its people to solidify a sense of unity. Yet their attempts to transcend the boundaries of identity usually failed. This paper will focus on the identity boundary problems of Zainich Chosenjin with the help of the literary work Yuhee (1988) written by a female Zainich Chosenjin author Lee Yangji (李良枝) in Japan.

Betweenness, the Illusory Self, and the Disruptive Subject : In Evolutionary Biology and Cognitive Science

Park, Iljoon Ewha Institute for the Humanities, Ewha Womans Uni 2009 탈경계인문학 Vol.1 No.-

This paper is to launch a discourse on subjectivity as betweenness illusorily presented as the self and to seek out its traces in science literature, especially in evolutionary biology and cognitive science. A hope between the lines of this text is most of all to bridge the religious and philosophical subjectivity to these scientific fields via betweenness discourse. Betweenness is argued to be a basic structure in which the self, the sense of the "I," is produced. Originally it derives from the transliteration of the Chinese character, 人間(human betweenness). Betweenness does not refer to person or subject, but it is a condition under which subjectivity may arise. Discourses in evolutionary biology contain this sense of betweennessbeing between genes, organism and environment. Through the interaction of and between them, individuality arises. The ways to explain the emergence of the sense of the self out of the interaction would be different, but it is agreed that individual subjectivity comes out of the interaction. With regard to the subjectivity issue, cognitive science materials also show the sense of betweenness in its frameworks of the computationism (Pinker 1997) and the enactionism (Varela 1993) models. From the perspective of the enactionism, the interaction between genes and environment creates the sense of the "I." All these say that betweenness is the condition for the emergence of subjectivity.

Loving Objects

Terry, Jennifer Ewha Institute for the Humanities, Ewha Womans Uni 2010 탈경계인문학 Vol.2 No.-

'Loving Objects' explores the formation of a newly named sexual rientation, objectum-sexuality (OS), claimed by people who openly eclare their desire for objects, not as fetishes, but as amorous partners. he article examines popular media depictions of OS which take a unspicious view of OS, arguing that these are symptomatic of worries bout what constitutes proper objects of love in the context of proliferating iscourses about emotional and territorial security. Comparing OS to ommercial consumption of objects as well as to scientists? enchantments ith their objects of study, the article draws on feminist technoscience tudies to argue that OS is not as strange as it would, on first contact, appear.

Paradox of the Other : Focusing on North Korean Defector Novels

Kim, Mi-Hyun Ewha Institute for the Humanities, Ewha Womans Uni 2010 탈경계인문학 Vol.2 No.-

The discourse about ‘the other’ focuses on the relationship between the subject and the other. More specifically, it mainly discusses the relationship from the subject’s point of view and ignores that of the other. Therefore, there isn’t enough discourse about how the other sees themselves or even another other. Baridaegi (바리데기) and Empire of Light (빛의 제국), however, show the paradox of the other through the very Korean other: North Korean defectors. In these novels, the other plays a role for the subject to overcome the limitations of being the subject. However, at the same time, the other is an ambivalent and contradictory one who is dissociated and lacking. Both of these others could be dangerous; the transcendental other who has ultimate motherhood (Baridaegi), and the cynical other who rationalizes his position as a scapegoat under oppressive laws (Empire of Light). This is because it could be possible to face up to the other as the other itself, only if we accept the blame that the more the maximization of the other’s positivity is, the stronger the other’s fantasy of itself is.

Film as Threshold : Kim Ki-Duk ’ s Film 3-iron and the 21st Century Korean Society

Kim, Soo Hwan Ewha Institute for the Humanities, Ewha Womans Uni 2009 탈경계인문학 Vol.1 No.-

This article examines director Kim Ki-Duk’s film 3-iron, also known as Empty House, as a crucial “threshold” to the cultural transformation of Korean society in the 21st century. Threshold here is used as a metaphor to refer to the entrance to a different situation, but at the same time a state with indefinite and latent possibilities. By examining Empty House as a threshold which represents itself as a symptomatic text that reveals the cultural transformation of Korean society, the author analyzes the ambivalent characteristics of the film from various angles, such as silent image, representation of minorities, and global/local cinema. Disappearance is meaningful in Empty House and is interpreted as a certain kind of deadlock which the subordinate subject of the 21st century Korean society faces: a moment when the political subject finally disappears. The important meaning of the film Empty House, as a threshold, is that it takes part of one axis of the common desire that is characteristic of 21st century Korean society, but at the same time shows the price Korean society has had to pay for that desire.