Special Session

Asian / Film and Media Studies

Kyooyung Ra (University of Southern California)
kyoo@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

The special session "Geographic Imaginations in Korean Media & Literature" invites papers and presentations on Korean media and literature that engage with the 2022 PAMLA Conference theme: “Geographies of the Fantastic and Quotidian.”

PAMLA 2022 is taking place in the city of Los Angeles, home to the Koreatown affectionately and humorously nicknamed “Naseong District.” Though this moniker is an old one, it connotes L.A. Koreatown’s status as the heart of vibrant Korean culture and the enclave's sizable Korean diasporic population in the U.S. It seems fitting to host a special session here to welcome papers and presentations on Korean media and literature that engage with the 2022 PAMLA Conference theme: “Geographies of the Fantastic and Quotidian.”

I would like to extend a scopious boundary for this session centering on “geographic imagination” in Korean media and literature. Your definition of “geographic imagination” could straightforwardly engage with geopolitical imaginations generated by or imposed upon Korea in relation to, say, Edward Said’s Orientalist imaginations or the nationalist imagined community of Benedict Anderson. Perhaps you could imagine geography and (inter)national histories as forgotten and depoliticized artifacts, as Panivong Norindr wrote in his 1996 publication Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature, quoting Mary Anne Doane’s observation of history as “accumulation of memories of the loved one.” Or, like Bliss Cua Lim theorized in Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique, you could transform media into fantastic spaces of “immiscible temporalities” that disrupt singular, linear, national time and visualize multiple, dynamic, and transnational temporalities.

Examples of potential paper topics include but are not limited to:

- Imagined nation, nationality, and nationalism of Korea
- Cosmopolitan imaginations of modern Korea
- Fantastic geography of Korean enclaves across the world
- Feminist re-imaginations of the Korean nation and national history
- Imagined and fantastic queer spaces in Korea
- North Korea as the uncanny Other in media and literature
- Legacies and present-day workings of colonial imagination in Korea
- Terrains of ambiance and affect in Korean media
- Deterritorialization and globalization of Korean popular culture (“K-pop”)
- Haunting subjects and haunted spaces in the Korean imagination
- Constructed or imagined spaces of Korean cinema
- Locality found in “universal” Korean television and streaming content

Please email session questions to Presiding Officer Ray Kyooyung Ra at kyooyung@usc.edu. Email general conference questions to director@pamla.org; for technical questions and support contact assistant@pamla.org.