Description:

Guest Lecture w/ Jinah Kim, Associate Professor of Communication Studies and faculty affiliate in Asian Studies, California State University, Northridge. 

In conversation w/ Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Professor of Performance Studies, Asian American Studies, and Theatre, Northwestern University. 

Drawing on her book Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas, this talk will elaborate on the book's core concept of insurgent melancholia, which is applied to theorize the unaddressed and unresolved violence related to US military violence during WWII and the Korean war. Kim will ground her discussion of insurgent melancholia through a close reading of Naomi Hirahara's neo-noir novel, Summer of the Big Bachi (2008) and Carlos Bulosan's posthumous noir novel All the Conspirators (2005; 1950s) and in the process reorient this iconic US genre and exhumes the figures of unresolved colonial conflict at the heart of 20th and 21st century US relations across the transpacific.

Jinah Kim is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies and faculty affiliate in Asian Studies at the California State University, Northridge. Her scholarship focuses on the American Century in Asia, with a focus on the legacies of the Korean War and US military occupation in Asia and the Pacific Islands. She is the author of Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas  (Duke University Press, 2019). She is the recipient of the 2021 NEH Award to support her second book, "Against Forgetting: Memory, Care, and Feminist Arts across the Transpacific.”