East Asian Humanities Workshop: "Political Moods: Film Melodrama and the Cold War in the Two Koreas" by Travis Workman
The East Asian Humanities Workshop invites you to the last session of its Winter quarter events! We are excited to announce the book talk featuring Professor Travis Workman’s most recent monograph Political Moods: Film Melodrama and the Cold War in the Two Koreas. Our discussant will be Alek Sigley (MTL Ph.D. student). This event will take place on March 21, 2024, from 4:30-6:00 pm in East Asia Library room 224. Following the book talk, we will be hosting a dinner for all attendees in Knight Building room 102.
If you would like to purchase Professor Workman’s book at a subsidized price of $10, please kindly RSVP by March 10, 2024. If you do not wish to purchase a book copy, please RSVP by March 18, 2024.
Political Moods: Film Melodrama and the Cold War in the Two Koreas
by Travis Workman
Melodrama films dominated the North and South Korean industries in the period between liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and the hardening of dictatorship in the 1970s. The films of each industry are often read as direct reflections of Cold War and Korean War political ideologies and national historical experiences, and therefore as aesthetically and politically opposed to each other. However, Political Moods develops a comparative analysis across the Cold War divide, analyzing how films in both North and South Korea convey political and moral ideas through the sentimentality of the melodramatic mode. Travis Workman reveals that the melancholic moods of film melodrama express the somatic and social conflicts between political ideologies and excesses of affect, meaning, and historical references. These moods dramatize the tension between the language of Cold War politics and the negative affects that connect cinema to what it cannot fully represent. The result is a new way of historicizing the cinema of the two Koreas in relation to colonialism, postcolonialism, war, and nation building.
About the Speaker:
Travis Workman is Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. Professor Workman is the author of Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan, and the editor and translator of Humanism, Empire, and Nation: Korean Literary and Cultural Criticism. His research interests cover Korean literature, film, and intellectual history; state violence and historical memory; melodrama; nationalism; humanism and its critiques. Thank you for your interest in the EAH Workshop’s winter events! We hope to see you there