Queer/ing Diaspora: Cacophonous Intimacies and Transpacific Entanglements in Kim Young-ha’s Black Flower

Event Description

By examining Black Flower (Kŏmŭn kkot) — renowned South Korean writer Kim Young-ha’s historical novel that narrates the tumultuous journey of 1,033 Koreans who migrated to Mexico in 1905 as indentured laborers — this talk explores the transpacific entanglements of Korean colonial modernity, Japanese imperialism, hemispheric American settler colonialism and racial capitalism, as well as Mexican and Guatemalan modern national projects. 

Taking seriously Asian and Indigenous intimacies that Kim’s novel brings forth only to dismiss as unproductive and failed encounters, this presentation explores the multiple scales of relation through what the author calls cacophonous intimacies: Asian and Indigenous intimacies interrupt, merge, and intersect with transpacific infrastructures of colonial dispossession, accumulated histories of empire (Spanish, Japanese, U.S.), and technologies of racialized gendering. Moreover, this talk contends that Korean-Mayan intimacies exist as spectral presences that signal traces disavowed in the progressive narratives that celebrate modern nationhood exemplified by the triumphant discourse on the Mexican Revolution or on the current South Korean sub-empire, thereby not only exposing colonialism and modernity as co-constitutive structures of domination, but the nation itself as diasporic space.

About the Speaker 

Junyoung Verónica Kim is Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian Cultures in the Department of Liberal Studies at New York University. Her interdisciplinary research examines how settler militarism, imperialism, and racial capitalism intersect in East Asia and Latin America and across hemispheric Asian American diasporas.  She has published articles on Korean immigration in Argentina, the Global South project, Transpacific Studies, Asian-Latin American literature, and Latin American involvement during the Korean War.  Dr. Kim is on the editorial board for the book series “Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia” for Palgrave Macmillian, and “Between Asias and Americas” for University of Pittsburgh Press, and serves on the executive committees of numerous scholarly organizations. She is an associate member of the Korea Policy Institute and a core member of the “Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective,” a public education initiative, which provides resources and tools —including a public syllabus — with the goal of decolonizing and demilitarizing the Korean peninsula. 

Exploring literary, visual, and cinematic texts across Asia-Latin America, her book in progress, "Cacophonous Intimacies: Reorienting Diaspora and Race in Asia-Latin America," centers Asian diaspora(s) in Latin America and reveals the intimacies between seemingly disparate histories of multiple imperialisms (Japanese, Spanish and U.S.), hemispheric American settler colonialism, and postcolonial nation building in both East Asia and Latin America. Currently, she has also started working on a new project tentatively titled "Nuclear Diaspora: Asian-Latin American Genealogies, the Black Pacific, and the Korean War", which examines the intersections, relations, and slippages between Indigenous dispossession, anti-Blackness, and hemispheric American racial formation of “the Asian” during the unending Korean War. Additionally, she is co-editing a special journal issue on "The Transpacific Korean War."

About the Asia-Latin America Connections Series

This series explores the ways in which the Latin American region has been shaped in its relation with people, power and practices that can be considered Global Asias, and the loops through which knowledge creation about Asia is transformed in its connection with Latin American epistemologies. 

By analyzing situated knowledges and experiences, and avoiding a totalizing perspective, the discussions we facilitate operate through two main themes. On the one hand, they ground the ageographical nature of Global Asias (Chen, 2021)  in the Latin American region, a spatially bound concept, to explore how they come together in cycles of territorial co-creation. On the other hand, they unsettle how Latin America is imagined through area studies — particularly in North America — to redefine the impact that Global Asias diasporas, geopolitics and culture have over the formation of complex political identities and solidarities, without (or in spite of) being mediated by western epistemologies. In sum, this series shifts the locus of enunciation — the place from which we make sense of the world (Mignolo, 1999)– to the points of connection where Asia and Latin America connect.  

Co-sponsors

• Department of Spanish and Portuguese

• Department of American Studies

• Department of English 

• Immigration History Research Center

• College of Liberal Arts Office for Diversity, Inclusion, Community Engagement & Equity

• Center for German & European Studies

• Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies