The Institute for Korean Studies
and
The Latin American & Hemispheric Studies Program
Present:
Lecture Series, “Korean Women, Argentine Documentaries:
A Look at La chica del sur (2012) and Una canción coreana (2014)”
Speaker
Chisu Teresa Ko, Associate Professor of Spanish, Ursinus College
Date & Time
Thursday, April 25, 2019, 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Venue
503 Conference Room
Elliott School of International Affairs, the George Washington University
1957 E Street, NW, Washington, DC 20052
◊ Event Description
This talk examines two recent Argentine documentaries focused on Korean women. La chica del sur (The Girl from the South, 2012) by José Luis García features the iconic South Korean student activist, Lim Su Kyung, who shocked the world in 1989 by visiting North Korea for the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students, a transgression for which she would be sentenced to five years in a South Korean prison. Una canción coreana (A Korean Song, 2014) by Yael Tujsnaider and Gustavo Tarrío sets out to depict the daily life of Ana Jung, a Korean immigrant in Buenos Aires, as she works on her artistic, business, and familial pursuits. While both women have “vocal” jobs and vocations—Lim is a politician and Jung a singer—the documentaries turn their attention to the ways their voices are silenced by gendered power structures or changing political discourses. This talk will take a close look at how these two Korean women are documented and imagined from the Argentine perspective. Furthermore, given that representations of Koreans in Argentina have been scarce and often negative, this talk also attempts to understand the ‘why’ and ‘why now’ of these two documentaries.
◊ Speaker
Chisu Teresa Ko, Ursinus College
Chisu Teresa Ko is Associate Professor of Spanish and Coordinator of the Latin American at Ursinus College. She specializes in Argentine cultural and racial studies with an emphasis on Asian Argentines. Her work on Argentine multiculturalism, Orientalism, and the place of Asians in Argentine cultural production has appeared in a wide range of scholarly venues. She is currently working on a book project titled Argentina: Race in a Raceless Nation.
◊ Moderator
Moderator: Jisoo M. Kim, GW Institute for Korean Studies
Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures and Director of the Institute for Korean Studies at GW. She received her Ph.D. in Korean History from Columbia University. She is a specialist in gender and legal history of early modern Korea. Her broader research interests include gender and sexuality, crime and justice, forensic medicine, literary representations of the law, history of emotions, vernacular, and gender writing. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on a new book project titled Suspicious Deaths: Forensic Medicine, Dead Bodies, and Criminal Justice in Chosŏn Korea.
This event is on the record and open to the media.
