Saturday, October 31th 1:00 – 2:30

Session Room: Loft 1

1) Haruki Eda, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
National Unification Meets Queer Diaspora: Multiple Subjectivities in Overseas Korean Community Organizing

The division of Korea impacts the lives of Koreans inside and outside of Korea. However, the dominant discourse of Korean unification often overlooks how overseas Koreans are actively engaging with the issue of unification through community organizing. Such political efforts can be found in Japan and the United States, two of the major destination countries for Korean migration. Overseas Koreans have begun to mobilize the concept of diaspora as a discursive resource to articulate ethnic and national belonging. This has enabled them to claim a stake and engage in the politics of their ancestral homeland by articulating a sense of national belonging and desires for unification at the interplay of gender, sexuality, and race. Feminist and queer theorists have criticized essentialist views on ethnicity, nationalism, and diaspora that reinscribe heteropatriarchal social structures. Meanwhile, peaceful unification of Korea remains an urgent objective for some overseas Koreans in the face of militarization and geopolitical tensions in Asia/Pacific. What kind of ethnic and national subjectivities are formed around the political project of unification? What does this type of community organizing say about the interplay of gender, sexuality, and race in the imagined national unification project? I will explore these questions through in-depth interviews with the members of three overseas Korean community organizations based in the U.S., which are working towards peaceful unification of Korea grounded in anti-imperialist and social justice claims. I will argue that, among these community organizers, particular queer diasporic subjectivities are formed around the project of unification. Articulations of such subjectivities illustrate a decolonial vision of unification and sovereignty that can be productively incorporated into social justice ideals of community organizing without resorting to the heteropatriarchal, exclusionary forms of nationalisms.

2) Sinkwan Cheng, Wesleyan University
Conceptual History and a New Politics of Translation: On the Receptions of Three Chinese Renditions of `Citizen

My Begriffsgeschichte study will investigate why guomin was better received than gongmin as the translation for “citizen” up till 1911, and why both terms were eventually replaced by renmin after 1949.  This reception history will reveal two major epistemological breaks created by divergent ideologies of “us and them” propagated by different regimes in China in the early twentieth century:

1. The early preference of guomin (“national”) as the translation for “citizen” was related to the attempts by Chinese intellectuals in the late Qing Dynasty to solidify the nation against the imperial powers. The preference for guomin over gongmin reached its peaks in the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05). Inspired by the quick rise of Japan which had once been a victim of Western colonialism, the Chinese literati embraced the Japanese interpretation and translation of “citizen” as guomin.
2. After 1949, the Communist government’s replacement of renmin (which literally means “people”) for gongmin and guomin marked the new government’s attempt to propagate a counter-concept of “us and them” against those espoused by the Guomindang and the West. Renmin, meaning “commoners” with no important role prior to the Communist Party, was being elevated above guomin after 1949 when strongly positive and moral semantics (such as uprightness and loyalty to the Party) were injected into the term. The moral idealization of renmin was further enhanced by the creations for this term two counter-concepts: diren (enemy) and guomin. “Renmin” (the people) in the New China represented everything opposite to diren (the enemy).

Renmin was also set in opposition to guomin (the national). I will examine the Communists’ denigration of guomin in favor of renmin.