|
AN OPENING
Crystal Mun-hye Baik
Read the embedded chapbook above, or download this free PDF.
AN OPENING is an edited excerpt from Reencounters: On the Korean War & Diasporic Memory Critique, a forthcoming book where I consider the enduring implications of the Korean War in the twenty-first century. Mobilizing Korean diasporic cultural works as aesthetic mediations of memory (including oral history projects, video installations, experimental films and time-based performances), Reencounters attunes to the persisting cycle of militarized repercussions that are indicative of rather than outside of the everyday. Demonstrating, for instance, how Korean militarized migrations are repackaged as American immigration history; how silences of war congeal into the hardened marrow of familial bonds; how war’s human returns become integral to the inner-workings of global economic infrastructures; and how the politics of national forgiveness collapses martial and leisure economies, Reencounters examines the terms of recognition that configure war’s manifestations as integral elements of the present. Thus, nestled within this larger book project, An Opening—with its haphazard arrangement of borrowed poetry, images and queries—is part and parcel of Reencounters’ diasporic memory archive.
CRYSTAL MUN-HYE BAIK is Assistant Professor in Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her first book, Reencounters: On the Korean War & Diasporic Memory Critique, will be published in Fall 2019 by Temple University Press. Her publications appear in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Verge: Global Studies on Asia, American Studies Journal, and Social Text/Periscope. Currently she lives in Los Angeles, CA.
This chapbook is part of the EP Groundloop Series. You can find other Groundloop digital chapbooks in our catalog.
|