Literature

Two recent Korean War novels, Ha Jin’s War Trash and Paul Yoon’s Snow Hunters, highlight a critical yet virtually unknown controversy over the voluntary or non-forcible repatriation of POWs that strung out armistice negotiations for fifteen months. By highlighting voluntary repatriation, War Trash and Snow Hunters produce revisionist accounts of the Korean War. Yet in the process of remembering this issue, both novels disconnect the cultural programs offered to prisoners from the psychological warfare operations that were conceived with the explicit goal of encouraging prisoners to defect. As writers of imaginative fiction, Ha Jin and Paul Yoon are obviously under no obligation to include any particular historical data or to address any specific historical context; it is the task of the critic of historical novels to contextualize the particular forms of historical consciousness they generate.

In this paper, I  explore a love for mountains through a reading of Gary Pak’s A Ricepaper Airplane, a novel that wanders across the Korean Peninsula, Manchuria, China, Japan, and Hawai‘i, assembling a diasporic perspective on twentieth-century Korea along the way. The focus and agent of the novel’s wanderings is Uncle Sung Wha, who has played many roles in his lifetime: “the revolutionary in China, the Korean patriot, the Communist, the aviator” (Pak 1998, 3). In addition to these roles, Sung Wha is a mountain wanderer and mountain lover. Mountains are always on Sung Wha’s mind, and many of the stories he tells from his deathbed to his nephew Yong Gil revolve around Mt. Kumgang (hereafter Kumgangsan or the Diamond Mountains), a historically, culturally, and geopolitically significant mountain range located in the Kangwon Province of North Korea near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the 4-kilometer buffer that divides North and South Korea.3

A Ricepaper Airplane constructs memories of mountains in general, and Kumgangsan in particular, as a constitutive feature of the Korean diasporic imagination. Lawrence Buell argues that “acts of environmental imagination … potentially register and energize … engagement with the world. They may reconnect readers with the places they have been and send them where they would otherwise never physically go. They may direct thought toward alternative futures” (2). In addition to offering (re)connections to the homeland and home mountains for those readers who, like Sung Wha, cannot return home because of the militarized division of the peninsula and the unending Korean War, A Ricepaper Airplane directs attention to the affirmative role that memories of mountains can play as a discursive resource for those movements working toward the overcoming of territorial division and the eventual reunification of the Korean Peninsula.

In this paper, I explore the question of whether Timothy Morton’s theory hyperobjects can teach us anything about fine dust air pollution. Thinking with Morton and seeing fine dust as a hyperobject means that the crisis of air pollution in South Korea must be understood as part of the much larger planetary crisis of global warming. Too often, air pollution and the warming of the Earth’s atmosphere are kept separate and not understood as interrelated parts of the same problem. Understanding fine dust as a hyperobject radically expands, both spatially and temporally, what it means to be ecologically aware. Such awareness is an important first step toward environmental change.

In this paper, I work to understand the multiple meanings of caves in relation to the Jeju April 3 (4.3) events. My particular focus is on Darangshi cave, both its discovery and the aftermath of that discovery, and the representation of caves in the film Jiseul (O Muel 2013). Both Darangshi cave and Jiseul testify to the necessity of understanding caves in order to fully understand the Jeju 4.3 events. The “turn to the material” in ecocriticism, and the idea of “storied matter,” can help theorize the social, political, and cultural significance of caves in the postcolonial history of Jeju Island. Viewing the Jeju 4.3 events from the perspective of the storied matter of caves offers a unique and unexplored angle on the first major battle of the cold war conducted under a U.S. military occupation. Rob Nixon asks, “What would it mean to bring environmentalism into a full, productive dialogue with postcolonialism?” This paper is an attempt to answer that question.

In 2000, Labzero, the Nam June Paik of rave culture, was driving and flying around the US, assembling ways of seeing inspired by neo-Tokyo for thousands of crazed ravers at parties featuring the likes of Sasha and Digweed, Frankie Bones, Carl Cox, Paul Oakenfold, Space Girl, Richie Hawtin, Dieslboy, Joshua Ryan, and Derrick May, while performing at mega-events like the "Whistle" parties in Philadelphia, "Freak Night" in Seattle, and ultimately trekking to the tanned, beat-soaked Mecca of electronic dance music, the Winter Music Conference in Miami. Like Dr. Frankenstein, these breakbeat scientists create digital monsters by creatively borrowing images from a wide range of sources: Hollywood, Hong Kong cinema, Japanese commercials, National Geographic specials, Japanimation, art books, magazines. They also add their own photography, computer graphics, and films into the mix. In Labzero's hands, the image is never an end-in-itself.  Rather, it exists to be continuously tweaked so that it becomes something else, resisting meaning and memory as it moves, merges, and collides with other images.  Unlike written stories, Labzero's stories don't have a beginning, middle, and end. You can’t go back and try to figure out what just happened. Rather, images are destined to disappear as they wander nomadically into an uncertain future, only to be reincarnated, repeated, but never the same. Dancing before Labzero's projections, the future rushes at you, and the best you can do is try to keep up.