2026-06-27 –, Room 403 PC Desk (Seats 30)
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.
Inter-imperiality, Vernacular, Cold War, Modern Korean History, Globalization, Cultural Studies
Parallel Performance: Women’s Bodies and Political Acts in East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America
Abstract for Additional Participant 1:This paper examines cross-cultural parallels in women’s performing arts in East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America during the Cold War and its aftermath. It claims that these regions developed interconnected yet independent progressions of global conceptualism. Recent scholarship, including the 2015 MoMA exhibition Transmissions, has highlighted how artists in Eastern Europe and Latin America from the 1960s to ‘80s challenged socialist ideologies and military dictatorships through dematerialized, ephemeral, and body-centered performances. However, similar developments in East Asia in the global art context remain relatively underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by investigating how Korean women artists during and after Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian rule demonstrated artistic affinities with their counterparts across Eastern Europe and Latin America...
Title for Additional Participant 2:Listening to Zainichi Silence: Affective Histories Across Korea–Japan Popular Music
Abstract for Additional Participant 2:Zainichi—ethnic Koreans who remained in Japan after Korea’s liberation in 1945—have been silenced in postwar Japan. Although Korea and Japan experienced political rupture until the 1965 normalization treaty, the lives of Zainichi Koreans reveal a continuous history of migration, displacement, and cross-border circulation that unsettles this narrative of separation. Following Ropers’s (2018) critique of textual silence, this paper examines how Zainichi history is voiced in popular music, revealing what Lie (2008) describes as Zainichi “in-betweenness.”
Cho Yong-p’il’s t’ŭrot’ŭ Come Back to Busan Port (1975) voices a Cold War plea for the repatriation of Zainichi Koreans. Its later Japanese cover by Misora Hibari reframes this call as domestic nostalgia, mobilizing enka’s status as a sonic marker of “Japan’s soul” (Yano 2003)...
Shadow Sovereignty: Smuggling and the Sensory Life of Inter-imperial Korea
Abstract for Additional Participant 3:This paper examines how ordinary Koreans navigated overlapping empires not through formal politics but through the sensory and material practices of the informal economy. Drawing on Laura Doyle’s concept of inter-imperiality, I argue that the period between the end of Japanese colonial rule and the consolidation of the U.S.-led Cold War order (1945–1965) was not a clean post-colonial rupture but a moment of intense inter-imperial transition. While the new South Korean state projected an official narrative of national rebirth, its survival was paradoxically sustained by a vast “shadow network” of smuggling that repurposed colonial maritime routes and capitalized on the influx of commodities from U.S. military bases...
Title for Additional Participant 4:Inter-Imperial Korea in Print
Abstract for Additional Participant 4:In the early postliberation years, Koreans were met with a political landscape shaped by the overlapping designs of competing U.S. and Soviet occupation regimes. Existing scholarship on this period has often focused on Cold War diplomacy or ideological division. This micro-historical study questions how Koreans themselves interpreted these structures in real time. I analyze a 1946 Chosŏn Ilbo editorial on the formation of the Interim Legislative Assembly under the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK). Drawing on Laura Doyle’s concept of inter-imperial positionality, I argue that the editorial reveals a vernacular Korean understanding of the Assembly not as an autonomous national institution, but as an organ “established as one of the military government’s institutions” within a broader field of global entanglement...
Alina Hassan holds a B.A. in Political Science and International Relations from Yonsei University and an M.A. in International Relations at the University of Tokyo. She is a multilingual scholar specializing in East Asian politics, with over a decade of living experience in Korea and Japan. Her interdisciplinary research explores the intersections of politics and history, with a focus on postcolonial theory, Korean colonial modernity, and the historical continuity of U.S. occupations in Korea and Japan. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in History and East Asian Studies.
Dain Lee is currently a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature and Culture at the University of Tokyo. She received her M.A. at the same institution and B.A. in Comparative Culture at Sophia University. Her research interests include global modern and contemporary art across Europe, the Americas, and East Asia, Fluxus, performing and media art, and women's art history.
Jiyoon Auo is a PhD student in Musicology at the University of Pittsburgh. Currently supported by the Mitsubishi Fellowship in Asian Studies, her research investigates the transnational soundscapes of Korea and Japan from the colonial to the postwar era, tracing how music circulated across empire, diaspora, and memory.
Jieon Yoo is currently a graduate student of Cold War and Decolonization, completing her Ph.D. in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Building on her M.A. thesis, "Shadow Networks: Smuggling and the Making of Modern Korea," her research seeks to write a history from below, centering the lived experiences of ordinary people caught between the forces of decolonization and the global Cold War. She is particularly interested in how informal economies, material culture, and the senses served as crucial sites for navigating and negotiating imperial power in everyday life.