JERONIMO + CHOSEN Screenings

with Director Joseph Juhn

October 5 | 7:00 PM, William Rainey Harper Memorial Library, Harper 140

October 6 | 5:00 PM, International House, Assembly Hall

This two-day screening event features documentary films, Jeronimo (2019) and Chosen (2022).

Jeronimo (2019, 93 minutes)

Born in 1926 to Korean indentured servant parents in Cuba, Jeronimo Lim joins the Cuban revolution and crosses paths with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. He becomes an accomplished government official in the Castro government, before turning to his Korean roots and dedicating the remainder of his life to rebuilding the Korean community in Cuba.

Chosen (2022, 89 minutes)

In 2020, five Korean Americans of vastly diverse backgrounds with competing political views run for US Congress – the most in U.S. history. David Kim is the only underdog with limited resources vying to be the first Korean American representative from Koreatown in Los Angeles as well as the first LGBTQ Korean American representative.

Each screening will be followed by a Q&A session with the director Joseph Juhn.

This event is co-sponsored with the International House Global Voices Program.

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Ling Kang

Associate Professor in

Modern Chinese Literature

Fudan University

The “Rhythm” of Revolution: Body Politics and the Voice in the Leftist Poetry Recitation

October 25, 2023, 7:00 pm

Zoom Virtual Lecture

In 1932, a group of leftist poets in Shanghai established the China Poetry Society, aiming to produce poetry that would enlighten and mobilize the masses to be the self-conscious political subject. In this talk, Professor Ling Kang, revisits the poetic works and theories of the members of the Society, focusing in particular on the extensive discussion on the historical origin and political relevance of poetic rhythm and its relationship with labor. Tracking the transnational circulation and transformation of the new knowledge of bodily rhythm and poetic rhythm since the late 19th century, this talk shows how a new conception of poetic rhythm as a mediating and mobilizing device gave rise to a series of leftist poetic experiments that attempted to construct the collective political subject through invoking the bodily solidarity of the laboring masses.

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Squid Game: Streaming TV in the Platform Era

November 10-11

Franke Institute for the Humanities

This upcoming workshop, taking place over 2-days, brings together scholars who work on television, social media, and digital platforms to think about how streaming platforms are changing the global circulation of tele-visual content. Using the success of Netflix’s Squid Game as a starting point, the participants will consider how streaming has changed what and how the world watches television; how it is reconfiguring the relation between producers and consumers across local contexts, particularly in East Asia; and how its interaction with other cultural platforms, like social media, encourage us to reconceptualize past ideas about audience response and the social uses of television.

This event is supported by a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the U.S Department of Education.

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Special Screening Series:

Ephemeral Architectures: Early Performance and Video Art from China

November 11-12

Logan Center for the Arts

This screening series will take place over the course of two days at the Logan Center for the Arts. This series will feature videos from University of Chicago’s Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor Wu Hung’s newly digitized archive of video and performance art from China. Both screenings will be followed by a roundtable discussion and audience Q&A.  

Organized in conjunction with the screening series, students from Center of the Art of East Asia Postdoctoral Instructor of Art History Ellen Larson’s Fall 2023 course Approaches to Contemporary Chinese Art, will co-curate a pop-up exhibition. The pop-up exhibition, also titled Ephemeral Architectures: Early Performance and Video Art from China will open on Thursday November 9, 2023, with an opening reception to take place on Saturday, November 11. The exhibition will be staged across the University of Chicago campus and include loans from UCLA’s Hammer Museum of Art and ShangART Gallery in Shanghai.

This program series is co-sponsored with the University of Chicago’s Parrhesia Program for Public Discourse, with generous support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Additional support is provided by UChicago’s College Curricular Innovation and Undergraduate Research Fund, the Department of Art History, and the Center for the Art of East Asia. 

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Sayaka Chatani

Associate Professor and Presidential Young Professor of History

National University of Singapore

Mothers, Daughters, and North Korean Feminism: Zainichi Experiences in Postwar Japan

November, 28 2023, 5:00 pm

Franke Institute for the Humanities

During the 1960s, Korean women in a leftist diasporic community in Japan displayed great enthusiasm for studying ideologies imported from North Korea. North Korea was entering the era of Kim Il Sung's cult of personality, and, in a similar vein, his mother, Kang Pan-sŏk, came to be worshipped as an iconic mother figure. The diasporic community in Japan, known as Chongryon, was at the peak of its organizational solidarity and popularity among resident Koreans (later referred to zainichi Koreans) as well. In this talk, Sayaka Chatani, discusses how the realities of diasporic families intersected with the North Korean emphasis on motherhood and how this affected mother–daughter relationships in these families. Professor Chatani will unpack various contexts, including the Koreans' drive for decolonization in postwar Japan, the global rise of the discourse on motherhood, the persistent patriarchal culture within the community, and inter-generational tensions typical to migrant societies, among others. These factors together created a unique dynamic for women in Chongryon.

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