The Birth of a (Korean) Nation (in Mexico)

Cacophonous Intimacies and Transpacific Entanglements in Kim Young-ha’s Black Flower.
Talk by Junyoung Verónica Kim (NYU)

By examining Black Flower (Kŏmŭn kkot) —renowned South Korean writer Kim Young-ha’s historical novel that narrates the tumultuous journey of 1,033 Koreans who migrated to Mexico in 1905 as indentured laborers— this talk explores the transpacific entanglements of Korean colonial modernity, Japanese imperialism, hemispheric American settler colonialism and racial capitalism, as well as Mexican and Guatemalan modern national projects. Taking seriously Asian and Indigenous intimacies that Kim’s novel brings forth only to dismiss as unproductive and failed encounters, this presentation explores the multiple scales of relation through what the author calls cacophonous intimacies: Asian and Indigenous intimacies interrupt, merge, and intersect with transpacific infrastructures of colonial dispossession, accumulated histories of empire (Spanish, Japanese, U.S.), and technologies of racialized gendering. Moreover, this talk contends that Korean-Mayan intimacies exist as spectral presences that signal traces disavowed in the progressive narratives that celebrate modern nationhood exemplified by the triumphant discourse on the Mexican Revolution or on the current South Korean sub-empire, thereby not only exposing colonialism and modernity as co-constitutive structures of domination, but the nation itself as diasporic space.

Sponsored by: Asian Societies, Cultures and Languages, Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies Program (LALACS), Leslie Center for the Humanities