Day 3: Reverberations of Unending War: Enacting Anti-Imperialist Solidarity in the Korean Diaspora

In memory of Hyun Lee

friday, august 12, 2022 | 10am - 3pm

Foregrounding political education as an anti-imperialist tool against permanent war, these two sessions represent the launch of the online, open-access Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective syllabus, a collaboration among antiwar activists and scholars that has been four years in the making. By focusing on the reverberations of the Korean War, a devastating war of imperial U.S. intervention that has yet to come to an end, we shift focus from U.S. Cold War academic debates about the war’s “origins” to a collaborative dialogue about the war’s “ends,” so to speak—namely, the consequences of its irresolution, including its ongoing violence and ramifications in the diaspora, in the present.

10am - 12pm: Liberatory Study to End the Korean War

In the first session, the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective will introduce our open-access syllabus, offering a walk-through of our lesson modules, analytical prompts, and online resources. Drawing inspiration from the recent wave of online, collectively authored syllabi, #StandingRockSyllabus and #IslamophobiaIsRacismSyllabus among others, our syllabus seeks to spark a set of conversations, within and beyond academic spaces, that contest quietist or complicit approaches to the profound violence and harm of the ongoing Korean War. This session will focus on our “Reverberations” module, which is organized around diaspora, kinship, and memory, considering how hyper-militarization, securitization, and partition have affected multiple generations across geographies entangled within U.S. military empire.

Minju Bae is a historian who currently works at the intersection of Asian American Studies and labor history. Her work investigates how Asian/Americans navigated the politics of work, racial difference, and the radical restructuring of the urban-based global economy. Her work has been supported by the Center for Engaged Scholarship, the Center for the United States and the Cold War, the Mellon Foundation, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities.

Crystal Mun-hye Baik (she/her) is a feminist memory worker residing in Tongva/Kizh territory. She is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside and the co-director of the Memory and Resistance Laboratory (MEMRES). Professor Baik is a core member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective and a co-editor of the book series, Critical Militarization Studies, at the University of Michigan Press. Her first book is titled Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique (Temple University Press, 2020) and she is currently working on a second book project that traces the making of anti-colonial memory archives against the backdrop of settler proprietorship.

Patrick Chung is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on the relationship between the U.S. military-industrial complex and the industrialization of East Asia during the Cold War. He is working on a book manuscript (Making Korea Global) that traces the impact of the U.S. military’s sustained presence on the Korean peninsula on the development of capitalism in South Korea and the Pacific following the Korean War. His work has been published in Diplomatic History, Radical History Review, and an edited volume titled Korea and the World: New Frontier in Korean Studies.

Christine Hong is Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Literature, chair of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and director of the Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of A Violent Peace: Race, Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific (Stanford UP, 2020). Along with Deann Borshay Liem, she co-directed the Legacies of the Korean War oral history project. She serves on the board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, an independent research and educational institute, and co-edits the Critical Ethnic Studies journal. She also co-edited a two-volume thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies on Reframing North Korean Human Rights (2013-14); a special issue of positions: asia critique on The Unending Korean War (2015); and a forum of The Abusable Past on “White Terror, ‘Red’ Island: A People’s Archive of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising and Massacre.”

Joo Ok Kim is assistant professor of cultural studies in the Department of Literature at UC San Diego. She is author of Warring Genealogies: Race, Kinship, and the Korean War (Temple UP, 2022). Her research and teaching interests include transpacific critique, literatures and cultures of the Korean War, and US multiethnic literature and culture. She is a member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective, as well as the Editorial Collective for Critical Ethnic Studies.

Monica Kim is Associate Professor and the William Appleman Williams Chair in U.S. International and Diplomatic History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Her book, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History, was published in 2019 by Princeton University Press. Beyond the classroom, she has been a member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective, and she was involved with community and campus organizing around Sanctuary during her time at New York University before arriving at UW-Madison.  She is currently a member of the editorial collective at The Radical History Review. Most recently, she co-edited a special issue of Radical History Review, titled "Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination," which came out in 2020. 

Youjoung (“Yuna”) Kim is a third-year PhD student at the Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University and a non-resident researcher at Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation. Her dissertation investigates bureaucratic procedures that are required to ensure the legal status of “victims” and “the bereaved” as outlined in the Jeju 4.3 Incident Special Act. Her project aims to illustrate how the official acknowledgment of “victims” and “the bereaved” configures the ways in which people honor their ancestors and how the South Korean state’s reconciliation project functions as nation-building intended to legitimatize state power. Before undertaking her doctoral studies, she worked as a researcher and a coordinator at Jeju 4.3 Research Institute and participated as a research collaborator in a project, Political Apologies Across Cultures, conducted by Tilburg University, the Netherlands.

Ji-Yeon Yuh is the founding faculty member of the Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern University, where she teaches Asian American history, Asian diasporas, race and gender, and oral history. She is a co-founder of the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea and a board member of the Korea Policy Institute, organizations devoted to educating policy makers and the public on Korea peace issues. A former journalist, she has worked for Newsday and served on the editorial board of the Philadelphia Inquirer. She is the author of Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America. Her current projects include a digital oral history repository focused on Asian diasporas, an oral history project on the Midwest as an Asian American space, and a book on Korean diaspora in China, Japan, and the United States.

1pm - 3pm: Hakseup for Radical Peace: A Conversation with Juyeon Rhee

In this closing session, members of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective will engage in dialogue and critical reflection with Juyeon Rhee, formerly the main coordinator for Nodutdol’s grassroots political education and exposure trips to both South and North Korea, about the role of anti-imperialist hakseup in fostering international solidarity within the diaspora. Profound in impact, the Korea Education and Exposure Program (KEEP) has enabled multiple generations of Koreans in the diaspora to engage with progressive and left organizations in South Korea and to visit North Korea on peace missions. Questions for consideration include the following:

• What is the role of hakseup in fostering international solidarity against imperialism?

• What have been, and continue to be, our challenges? What new challenges have emerged? Conversely, what strategies have been effective and why?

• What role can those of us in the diaspora play within a transnational anti-imperialist movement?

Juyeon Rhee is a first-generation Korean immigrant and a grassroots organizer who has worked for decades on demilitarization, peace, and unification in Korea. She has been a member of Nodutdol for Korean Community Development since 2000 and is currently on the board. She formerly served as the main organizer of Nodutdol’s KEEP (Korea Education and Exposure Programs), which educates and sends Korean Americans to North and South Korea who return resolved to work for peace and social justice. She has led Nodutdol’s Korean Language Program, study groups on Korea and U.S. militarism in Asia and the Pacific, and its Peace Treaty Campaign. From 1991 to 1998, she was a member of the Center for Korean American Culture (우리문화찾기회) and served as the Executive Director from 1993 to 1995. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from SUNY at Stony Brook, a J.D. from Brooklyn Law School and an Associate degree in Science from the Massage Therapy program at Swedish Institute in New York.