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FEB
6
The Art of Protest
Date:
Thursday, 06 Feb 2020
Time:
3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Location:
303 International Center
Department:
Asian Studies Center
Event Details:

Street protests are a veritable art form in South Korea, perfected through more than sixty years of bloody confrontations with state power. In 2016-2017, this form reached its full potential as a vehicle for political change as the city square in the heart of the nation's capital transformed into a raucous but family-friendly stage for spectacles of popular dissent in a sequence of events that has been celebrated as the Candlelight Revolution. This talk will look back on the history of street protests in South Korea, focusing on its "language of contention" (Tarrow 2013) so as to explore the mechanisms of collective identity formation and political subject-making that have made South Korea's protest culture one of the most dynamic in the modern world.

Youngju Ryu is an Associate Professor of Korean Literature at the University of Michigan and the author of Writers of the Winter Republic, the winner of 2018 James Palais Book Prize, and numerous articles on Korean literature, film, and media. She serves as the co-editor of Perspectives on Contemporary Korea, a book series published by the University of Michigan Press and has edited two volumes on colonial and contemporary Korean culture.

*Reception to follow

Sponsors: Council on Korean Studies, Learning Community on Identity Formation in Global Contexts, Academic Advancement Network, Asian Studies Program, Center for Gender in Global Context (GenCen), Citizen Scholars Program, Japanese Studies Program, Japan Council, College of Arts and Letters, Department of Linguistics and Languages, Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities, Romance and Classical Studies