WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

According to Laura Doyle (2020), “inter-imperiality” is a condition in which empires continually shape one another through overlapping infrastructures, labor regimes, and affective economies. From Japanese coloniztion to U.S. military occupation, Cold War division, and ongoing geopolitical pressures, Korean history reveals how inter-imperial forces reformed and reoccupied colonial infrastructures within shifting regional and global orders. This panel explores how dynamics in modern Korea formed different sites of culture, mobility, and everyday practice.
To pursue this approach, this panel addresses vernacular forms of connectivity and sovereignty within the inter-imperial field of Cold War Korea. Following Anna Tsing’s (2004) observation that global connections arise in local frictions, we use “vernacular” to highlight the situated, improvised, and relational practices through which ordinary actors rework imperial forces in everyday life. Breaking away from state-centric narrative, we examine how ordinary or marginalized groups forged transnational connections and enacted alternative forms of sovereignty through everyday cultural practices.
To elaborate, Lee examines transnational parallels of Korean women artists and those from Eastern Europe and Latin America in performing arts; Auo analyzes cross-border affective histories embedded in Korean and Japanese popular music; Yoo investigates sensory and material networks of smuggling that structured everyday economic life; and Hassan delves into print media revealing Koreans’ understanding of contemporary political circumstances. Collectively, our papers demonstrate that these cultural approaches were not peripheral to the making of the modern Korean state; rather, they constituted crucial sites in which imperial legacies were reworked, Cold War structures negotiated, and new forms of agency emerged.