A World In The Making: a free virtual symposium on Seeing Like A Child: Inheriting the Korean War

Graduate students at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Anthropology invite you to attend “A World In The Making,” a free virtual symposium on Professor Clara Han’s recently published book, Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (2020).

The event, which will include live interpretation between Korean and English, will be held on April 30th from 9-11am EST. Panelists include Monica Kim, historian; Lotte Buch Segal, anthropologist; Han Yujoo, novelist and author of The Impossible Fairytale; and Jiyoon Lee, poet and translator of Cheer Up, Femme Fatale. Panel reflections on the book’s themes will be followed by comments from the author, an open discussion, and audience Q&A.

Professor Han’s book explores how the catastrophic event of the Korean War is dispersed into domestic life. Han writes from inside her own childhood memories, as the daughter of parents who fled from the North to the South of Korea, and whose displacement in Korea and subsequent migration to the United States implicated the fraying and suppression of kinship relations and the Korean language. At the same time, Han writes as an anthropologist whose fieldwork has taken her to the devastated worlds of her parents—to Korea and to the Korean language—allowing her, as she explains, to find and found kinship relationships that had been suppressed or broken in war and illness. Seeing Like a Child sees the inheritance of familial memories of violence as embedded in how the child inhabits her everyday life.

The organizers hope that participants and attendees will find the event a compelling invitation to consider the specificities and affective dimensions of Asian-American experiences in light of recent (and longstanding) anti-Asian violence in the United States, rooted in the nation’s histories of colonialism and war.

Participants can register using this link: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJclcOGvrzsjEtHLuD1i8G97h1ZwbckdthHI