Date & Time: December 1st, 2021, 12:00PM-1:30PM
Location: https://snu-ac-kr.zoom.us/j/
Inquiries: anthrobk21plus@snu.ac.kr
Language: English
"Postsocialist Encyclopedia" is an ongoing experiment with writing that grapples with the idea of the "post" in postsocialism as it reverberates in north Korea. It seeks to rethink and reencounter the experience of socialism and its afterlives. It aims to enact a mode of relation, to incite feeling, to recover something of the socialist world. It turns to writing to get at another language, forms of expression that can embody, however tenuous and kaleidoscopic, the affect, aesthetics, and nostalgic distance of that world. It looks to north Korea as a site of potentiality and impossibility, one that demands a punctum-like shift from the usual ways north Korea is figured. And it does these things by following certain recurring themes--rupture, loss, nostalgia, ambivalence--as I attempt a kind of writing in its wake, a writing that can honor the complexities of the communist project.