Presented by the IAS Collaborative Gender and Violence: South Korea and Beyond & the Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota

This year, global “contagions” reached multiple tipping points: as seen from the COVID-19 pandemic that compounded racialized hatred, and contagious Black Lives Matter protests that fanned out worldwide. These cases materially and biologically substantiated the interconnection between racism, pathological discourse, postcolonialism, necropolitics, and media culture. Now more than ever, “contagion” is a dominant form for thought. Biological dimensions of contagion take on social resonances, and vice versa. The unknowability of contagious diseases tends to boost public anxiety over racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, as well as “exotic” animals. On the other hand, social phenomena, like public rioting, Internet vernaculars, and even collective laughter, are often dubbed “contagious.” In science studies, contagion is biological, viral, material. In the humanities and social sciences, it is geopolitical, racialized, and gendered. From an ecocritical perspective, contagion is material and political as when bodies of land and sea are the site of viral-like impacts of capital. We propose to think through the pandemic and post-pandemic epistemology. We adapt contagion as a new methodology of blurring the boundaries and percolating through different nations, disciplines, media, genres, genders, and races. 

For this biennial AMES Graduate Conference, graduate student scholars in East Asian studies will respond to this theoretical prompt of contagion across different media, cultures, genres of writing, research methodologies, geopolitical areas, and disciplinary languages. 

Keynote Speakers

• Professor Sangjoon Lee (Nanyang Technological University)
  Keynote Speech: Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network
   
• Professor Nathaniel Isaacson (NC State University)
  Keynote Speech: Not Dreaming and Other Techniques of the Body: Trains, Technology and Nation in Socialist Print Culture

Organizers

• Soyi Kim ([email protected])
• Soo Jackelen ([email protected])

Schedule

April 30 Fri (CST)

(EST 2:00 - 8:30 pm / Singapore 3:15 - 9:30 am) 

1:00 - 1:15 pm Opening Remarks: Professor Christine Marran (AMES, UMN)
1:15 - 2:45 pm  Panel 1

• Mi, Aolan (Indiana) 
  “Animated Locomotives: Trains in Chinese Children’s Magazines in the 1930s” 
• Wang, Dingding (UC San Diego) 
  “Viral Thinking and Biotechno-Symbiosis: Virus and Infection in Chinese Literature and Popular Discourse”
• Xu, Kaiyang (USC) 
  “Africa in Chinese Travelogues: the Layering of Cinematic Space and the “Contagious” Camera in Negotiation with the Border”
• *Discussant : Jason McGrath (AMES, UMN)

2:45 - 3:00 pm  Break 
3:00 - 4:30 pm  Panel 2

• Miller, Adam T. (UC Irvine) 
  “Zombies in the Anthropocene: Environmental Anxiety and Evolution in South Korean Media”
• Kim, Soyi (Minnesota) 
  “Viral and Visceral: Extremist Online Feminist Collectives, Megalia and Womad, and the Image-Based Sexual Abuse in South Korea”
• Tan, Roxanne (Yonsei)
  “Race in a pandemic: The Necropolitics of the racialised body in fictional representations of a pandemic”
• *Discussant : Travis Workman (AMES, UMN)

4:30 - 5:00 pm  Break
5:00 - 6:30 pm  Keynote Speech: Professor Sangjoon Lee (Nanyang Technological University)
6:30 - 6:45 pm  Break 
6:45 - 7:30 pm  Plenary Session (Q&A & Social)

May 1 Sat (CST)

(EST 10:00 am - 4:45 pm / Singapore 11:00 pm - 5:45 am)

9:00 - 10:30 am  Panel 3 

• Cole, Megan (UC Irvine) 
  “From “Earth’s Best Friend” to “Unkillable Ghost” (and Back Again): A Literary History of Kudzu in the American South”
• Yamato, Narusa (Stanford) 
  “The Rise of the Dairy Industry and Contagious Diseases in Japan”
• Kim, Eunice (Minnesota) 
  “Military Refugee Camps on Ports and Boats: Medicalization of Migrant Bodies and the Deportation Regime Since 1965”
• *Discussant : Hiromi Mizuno (History, UMN)

10:30 - 10:45 am  Break 
10:45 - 12:15 pm  Panel 4

• Li, Ziyang (UC San Diego)
  “Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary, Pandemic, Digital Space and World Literature”
• Jeon, Insil (Minnesota) 
  “Representation of the marginalized in nationwide curriculum in South Korea”
• Xiaoli Yang (Minnesota)
  “Aerial Materiality and Spectral Bodies: Cultivating a Viral Ecology”
• *Discussant : Ning Ma (AMES, UMN)

12:15 - 1:15 pm  Lunch Break (Zoom Social)
1:15 - 2:45 pm  Keynote Speech: Professor Nathaniel Isaacson (NC State U)
2:45 - 3:00 pm  Break 
3:00 - 3:45 pm  Plenary Session (Q&A + Wrap-up Discussion)

Contact Information

For any questions regarding the conference, contact organizers Soyi Kim ([email protected]) and Soo Jackelen ([email protected]) or the conference email ([email protected]).