100 Washtenaw Ave, Ann Arbor, MI 48109
As the name of the constitutional reform that inaugurated South Korea’s Fourth Republic (1972-79), Yushin has become synonymous with the second half of the Park Chung Hee era when extreme political repression was coupled with total mobilization of society under the double imperatives of modernization and development. Existing scholarship on the period has focused on its political and economic dimensions, and given rise to such influential concepts as “developmental dictatorship” (kaebal tokchae) and “mass dictatorship” (taejung tokchae).
Moving beyond the era’s political economy, the conference on “Cultures of Yushin” seeks to explore the remarkably rich and varied cultural production of the Yushin period in its dynamic, and often ambivalent, relationship to state power. Cultural production is broadly conceived to include literature, film, television, theater, music, art, architecture, animation, comics, advertising, fashion, and sports. We welcome innovative research that complicates familiar terms of opposition between coercion and consent, collaboration and resistance, and high art and popular culture.
“Cultures of Yushin” is the fourth annual conference on contemporary Korea sponsored by the Academy of Korean Studies and the Nam Center for Korean Studies at the University of Michigan. Previous conferences in the series have examined the phenomenon of Hallyu in the age of social media, transgressive practices in Korean society, and the politics of sports. Kicking off a two-day event devoted to the decade of the 1970s, the conference will be followed by an international workshop on the legacies of major public intellectuals of the 1970s, including Ham Sok-hon, Paik Nak-chung, Ri Yong-hui, Kang Man-gil, Shin Il-yong, and An Pyong-mu. The workshop will be led by historians, literary critics, and sociologists from the United States, Japan, and Korea.
Papers presented at “Cultures of Yushin” conference will be considered for inclusion in a peer-reviewed, edited volume of the same title to be published by the University of Michigan Press, as part of Perspectives on Contemporary Korea series. Selected participants will be asked to submit complete papers by September 30, 2014.
Conference organizers: Youngju Ryu and Nojin Kwak (University of Michigan)
