The East Asia Center will be hosting Mi-Ryong Shim, Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies at the University of Georgia, for her speaker series lecture "Mobility’s Unfreedoms: Eugenics and the Promotion of Korean Migration in Manchurian Pioneer Literature."

As Mary Louise Pratt has noted, “the equation of mobility and freedom” has long become “built into” our modern imagination. As such, colonial domination is often envisioned in terms of confinements and enclosures, while flows and exchanges are linked with the politics of liberation or subversion of authority. Yet, the wartime Japanese empire entrenched its hegemony through channeling – and even facilitating – certain modes of transborder movement for the colonized, but in ways that were no less problematic than blocking them. This talk reveals such unfreedoms of mobility by examining works of pioneer literature (kaech’ŏkmin munhak), a distinct genre within Korean literature emerging after 1939 that narrated the lives of Korean immigrants in Manchuria. It analyzes how colonial writers highlighted the bloodline of the Korean diaspora to legitimate their movement within the expanding Japanese empire. The talk illuminates how, even as these literary works challenged the barriers set up against the free mobility of Korean migrants, they did so by partially accepting the imperial logic of racial hierarchy and, moreover, turning to the authority of fascist race science to provide the colonial diaspora with biologically defined rights to settle in imperial territories beyond the colony.

The talk will be held Friday, March 28, from 3:15 - 4:30 p.m. in Gibson 211.