Description:

Part of the One Book, One Northwestern event series surrounding Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart, this talk examines the rhetoric and embodied performance of mourning by “Sewol Parents.” Dr. Jinah Kim develops the idea of insurgent melancholia to explain their role in moving a nation and the Korean diaspora across the Pacific, including fueling the democratic movement to impeach Korea’s first female president, Park Geun Hye, in 2017. While the nature of neoliberal violence is to seek invisibility, the diasporic mourning connected to these students who drowned aboard the Sewol Ferry revived memories of Korea’s dictatorial period and fueled new progressive politics and culture spanning the U.S. and Korea, making visible the ongoing violence of U.S. militarism and capitalism across the Pacific. By engaging representations of the broken family that frames the survivors’ insurgent melancholia, the talk reflects on the unruliness of watery graves. Dr. Kim will also discuss grief and the art of loss in broader Korean diasporic cultural productions. Dr. Elizabeth Son (Northwestern) and Dr. Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson (Northwestern) will serve as discussants.

Please register here.