{"id":5981,"date":"2008-09-14T21:07:28","date_gmt":"2008-09-15T02:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/korea\/?p=298"},"modified":"2008-09-14T21:07:28","modified_gmt":"2008-09-15T02:07:28","slug":"baks-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2008\/09\/baks-2008\/","title":{"rendered":"BAKS 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I just returned to SG this past weekend from BAKS (British Association Korean Studies) 2008, and wanted to post as the film panel in particular intersects nicely with something posted earlier this summer.\u00a0 For\u00a0those interested in a brief summary of the conference as a whole, please see Philip Gowman’s take at:\u00a0http:\/\/londonkoreanlinks.net\/2008\/09\/12\/baks-conference-report-looking-forward-looking-back\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To return to the issue of film,\u00a0the Tuesday afternoon panel (9 \/ 9) offered a number of interesting film clips, one of\u00a0which featured two scenes from “Homeless Angels” \/\u00a0\u00a0\uc9d1\uc5c6\ub294 \ucc9c\uc0ac.\u00a0 \u00a0To be fair, I would have to see the entire film to say more; but for now, I agree with a basic reading of the film which reads the placement of these Korean orphans in terms of a paternalistic Japanese state and ithe attempted formation of new imperial subjects through tutelage.\u00a0 The scene I’m\u00a0referring to specifically in making this claim comes near the close of the film, and features one of the characters saluting \/ reciting while the Japanese flag is being raised: in effect, the perfomative\u00a0force of the scene is\u00a0roughly equivalent\u00a0to a recruitment pitch.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The speaker \/ presenter also raised an interesting point in conjunction with this film–and I want to be careful, as I’m\u00a0operating here\u00a0on jet lag, and may be conflating points made across the entire panel–pointing to the recurring popularity of the trope of the displaced orphan, with (1) “Boys Town” featured as one\u00a0of the earliest films approved and shown by USAMGIK, and with the subsequent appearance of (2) Douglas Sirk’s (1957) “Battle Hymn.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 While I’m not comfortable with making sweeping juxtapositions from the standpoint of history–would want to know much more about the circumstances underlying each of the\u00a0three films before making any links–the loose observation in the previous paragraph does lend itself to some interesting comparative questions.\u00a0 Namely,\u00a0what were the economic \/ social \/ political \/ communitarian ideals informing the practice of dealing with refugees (particular orphans) during and in the aftermath of the Korean War?\u00a0 I’m familiar with\u00a0an overall take that places New Deal reformers, broadly construed,\u00a0in Japan and Korea for the respective occupations, but does this suggest potentially that 1930’s American-style social welfare practices were simply mapped onto the issue of dealing with refugees and orphans?\u00a0 Can we complicate this further with the recognition (see Dan Rodgers and Atlantic Crossings<\/em>)\u00a0\u00a0that much of the New Deal was\u00a0informed by\u00a0an eclectic set of borrowed\u00a0practices from earlier European\u00a0practices related to\u00a0social welfare?<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0What I’m\u00a0fumbling at here, in a none too articulate fashion, are ways of comparing the social welfare practices adopted under USAMGIK (and during the subsequent Korean War), and the\u00a0comparable practices mobilized under Japanese Imperial authority\u00a0only a decade or two earlier.\u00a0 In what ways were Americans attempting to form new subjects of Korean orphans (perhaps new “South Korean” subjects?)–if we put this to the same litmus test as the Japanese Imperium–and how\u00a0were \u00a0American practices distinct \/ different?\u00a0 My recollection of images of orphans from the Holt\u00a0folks (see the historical introduction at the Holt International website, which links the 1955 founding of the organization to Holt’s viewing of a film about Korea) is that they were generally designated as\u00a0“Korean,” but is this an innocent designation or does it assume a case where half of the peninsula subsumes the whole?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I’m trying to do this kind of work for medicine now (looking at material and pedagogical changes in medical education pre and post war), and wondering what\u00a0this might\u00a0look like in\u00a0a similar \u00a0context.\u00a0 I also recognize that the question of distingiushing between categories\u00a0and attributing sources of authority becomes almost hopelessly muddled, as what’s “Japanese” and\u00a0“American” is rarely clear, and there’s a signficant difference between the offical rhetoric and on the ground practice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I just returned to SG this past weekend from BAKS (British Association Korean Studies) 2008, and wanted to post as the film panel in particular intersects nicely with something posted earlier this summer.\u00a0 For\u00a0those interested in a brief summary of the conference as a whole, please see Philip Gowman’s take at:\u00a0http:\/\/londonkoreanlinks.net\/2008\/09\/12\/baks-conference-report-looking-forward-looking-back\/. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To return…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[212,219,177,126,226,239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1945-1950","category-colonial-period","category-film","category-general","category-korean-war","category-us-korea"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-1yt","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5981\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}