Forum on Critical Issues in Korean Studies

February 20, 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Mānoa Campus, Center for Korean Studies

The fifth Center for Korean Studies Forum on Critical Issues in Korean Studies will feature two presentations by Heonik Kwon, professorial senior research fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. The first presentation, on February 20, is titled "The Transpacific Cold War." The Cold War was a peculiar political formation. It was neither a real war nor a genuine peace, while being fought primarily by ideological, economic, and polemical means. This prevailing public image of the global bipolar political history of the past century is centered on the experience of the era by communities along the transatlantic horizon. Shifting our view to the historical milieus of Asia-Pacific, however, this understanding of the Cold War as an imaginary war or a warlike peace runs into a set of contradictions. The lecture will examine some of these semantic contradictions embedded in the idea of the Cold War and explore the merits of a pluralist approach to Cold War history. As an illustration of the transpacific Cold War’s specificity, the discussion will consider the political crisis of family lives during and after the Korean War, on the one hand, and, on the other, ideas and metaphors of kinship that were constitutive of the making of the Cold War political orders in the region across the ideological divide.


Event Sponsor
Center for Korean Studies, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Merclyn Labuguen, 956-7041, merclyn@hawaii.edu, http://www.hawaii.edu/korea/

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