03-26-2026 The Diasporic Afterlives of Gwangju: Minor Identifications and Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution with Daniel Y. Kim

Thursday, March 26, 5 PM – 6:30 PM
Global Asian Literary Studies
CAS 533B & Via Zoom
685 Commonwealth Ave., Boston MA
Please register here for the Zoom link. Please register in advance.

Moderator/Discussant: Yoon Sun Yang (Boston University)

The unended status of the Korean War was made dramatically evident in then-President Yoon Suk Yeol’s infamous proclamation on the evening December 3rd, 2024: “I declare emergency martial law to defend the free Republic of Korea from the threats of North Korean communist forces and to eradicate the shameless pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people and to protect the free constitutional order.” For many in the country, this event evoked memories of the last time martial law had been declared and particularly the uprising and massacre that took place in Gwangju in the spring of 1980. This paper focuses on Cathy Park Hong’s long narrative poem Dance Dance Revolution (2007) which looks back to that event from the perspective of a fictionalized student activist who played a vital role in it and embeds its readers in an affective poetics that invites them to grasp how the military dictatorships that ruled South Korea for decades were a direct manifestation of a longer and complex colonial history of which the Korean War was simply the most dramatic part. Dance is largely written in an invented vernacular, and the primary speaker of these poems is the Guide, who speaks to the reader in an alternative version of the present from an imaginary city—a city depicted as a settler colonial state. This essay focuses on the minor identifications this poem attempts to engender through its poetics—affective identifications that bring into Glissantian relation the South Korean sub-imperial and US imperial legacies of the Korean War and Gwangju, on the one hand, and settler-colonial formations like Israel/Palestine, on the other. 

Speaker Bio: Daniel Y. Kim is Professor of American Studies and English at Brown University, where he teaches classes in Asian American literature, American literature, and Ethnic Studies. He has also taught as the Norman Freehling Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities and as a Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at Yale University. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and his AB from the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War (NYU Press, 2020) and Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford University Press, 2006) and the co-editor (with Crystal Parikh) of The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2015). His essays have been published in a number of journals, including American Literary History, American Quarterly, Criticism, Cross-Currents, Journal of Asian American Studies, New Literary History, Novel, and positions.

Moderator/Discussant: Yoon Sun Yang (Boston University)