• The Korean Journal of Archival Studies
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• no.68
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• pp.107-150
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• 2021

Representation of an entity starts with recognition of its existence, and recording is mutually circular in that it acts as a means to enable the recognition of the existence. No record is left on an unrecognized entity, record is distorted if any, and the distorted reproduction represents the entity, reinforcing its invisibility. Spivak describes those who cannot speak on their own and cannot be represented as subaltern. This paper examines public record, the media and research records of female restaurant workers, identifies the subaltern characteristics and limitations of their records, and suggests the points to be considered and specific roles required for recording the subalterns. If it is possible to increase the possibility of representation by completely recording a person as an entity that contains the times and society, the accountability of the record to provide an account will extend beyond institutions to the times and society, and individuals and community will be established as political subjects.

• The Southeast Asian review
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.73-99
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• 2010

To properly answer the question 'Why have Vietnamese Women kept appearing in Korean Films and TV dramas?', We need to induce Postcolonial discourse along with historical and cultural similarities between Korea and Vietnam. It is because the relationship of two countries can be defined as a neocolonialism specially in view of economic relationship. Koreans need to locate themselves on the superior position by othering Vietnamese women, who are close enough to be compared and also distant enough to be othered. This paper is intended to bring their being in Korean films and TV dramas under the light of postcolonial discourse. According to the postcolonial concepts such as ambivalence, stereotyping and subaltern, Korean films and TV dramas are classified into three groups, which are Vietnam war melodramas, Horror movies based in Vietnam, and TV dramas with Vietnamese brides. War melodramas have been othering Vietnamese woman through ambivalence of the fear of Vietcom warrior and the fascination of exotic beauty. Horror movies, produced about 10 years later, brought the Vietnamese women back to Korean audience, stereotyping them into ghosts, which are incarnated through the suppression and eruption of sexual desire. The third group consists mainly of TV dramas. Their story usually evolves around Vietnamese brides migrating into Korea. The women are forced into the position of Subaltern, not representing themselves in their own voices. Facing multi-cultural society, our visual media are requested to modify their neocolonial approach of presenting Vietnamese women. To accomplish the goal, they have to find ways of storytelling to show the women in their everyday lives and help them to speak for themselves.

• Journal of the Daesoon Academy of Sciences
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• v.37
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• pp.141-190
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• 2021

In early modern Korea, the founders of three main-stream indigenous new religions, Choi Je-woo (崔濟愚), Kang Il-sun (姜一淳), and Park Jungbin (朴重彬), were all ruined yangban, who could no longer maintain the social dignity of yangban. Prior to their regular religious activities, they earned livings as rural teachers, peasants, merchants, and fortune-tellers. They were marginalized for having declined from upper-class nobles to lower-class people. Due to their subalternal status, they religiously represented the inexpressible aspirations and resentments held by various subalterns. The millennial movements of marginal religions in the late Joseon Dynasty exposed and deviated from the fetters of the established order, but they did not propose a new alternative order to replace it. Unlike these millennial movements, Choi Je-woo, Kang Il-sun, and Park Jungbin all proposed utopian visions of post-subalternal alternative religions that systematically presented and practiced new alternative worldviews characterized by the "Great Opening of the Later World (後天開闢)." The world they longed for was one wherein anti-subalternal social regulation were overthrown, the oppression of various subalterns end, and the established social order was replaced. In this article, I have argued that three main-stream indigenous Korean new religions, Donghak (Eastern Learning), the Jeungsan-inspired religious movements, and Wonbulgyo (Won Buddhism) are utopian alternative religions. I made this argument by analyzing some aspects by which they represented subalterns and offered subalterns a new religio-social status.

• Women's Studies Review
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.79-120
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• 2011

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate the implication of feminist oral history from a postcolonial feminist perspective as critically reexamining the relationship between hearer and speaker, representer and narrator, the said and the unsaid, and secrecy and silence. Based upon oral (life) history of a U.S. military prostitute (yanggongju), I tried to show the experiences of a historically-excluded and marginalized 'Other,' and then critically reevaluate the meaning of encountering 'Other', not just through the research process but also in the post/colonial society in Korea. The narrative of an old woman in the "kijichon" (a formal prostitute in U.S. military base) shows how woman has navigated the boundaries between inevitability/coincidence, the enforced/the voluntary, prostitution/intimacy, and military prostitute/military bride while continually negotiating as well as having conflict with various myths and ideologies of the 'normative woman,' 'nationhood,' and 'normal family.' In addition, her narrative which causes the rupture of our own stereotypical images of a military prostitute not only proves the possibility of reconstructing the self-identity of a subaltern woman, but also redirects the research focus from the research object to the research subject (ourselves). Consequently, the implication in feminist oral history is that feminist researchers who whish to represent the experiences of other should first inquire 'what/how we can hear,' 'why we want to know others,' and 'who we are,' while simultaneously asking if subaltern woman can speak.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.84
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• pp.99-123
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• 2017

We analyzed the movie (2016/ directed by J-yong E), which is entangled in politics of gender, age, class, or sexuality, naming as "spaces of Others", using the concepts of heterotopia of Foucault. Foucault addressed three types of spaces: the realistic space where we currently live, the unrealistic and non-existent utopia, and heterotopia, which functions antithetically to reality. Thus, Foucault's heterotopia can be considered to indicate "heterogeneous spaces" in reality. The Bacchus Lady revolves a 65-year old prostitute So-Young, sells her body to old men at the parks in downtown of Seoul. Old prostitute on streets are often referred as "Bacchus Ladies", because suggest the popular energy drink a bottle of Bacchus while selling sex. The movie represents some minorities such as transgender, Tina and madam of the club, G-spot, migrant women like Camila and Aindu, and a amputee, Dohoon. Through these people's bodies, the problems such as imperials, nations, ethnics, gender, age, class are entangled in the movie. The politics of these points work and construct heterotopias in four spaces of Others. First, the spaces which ageing and death are intersected. Second, the spaces of So-Young for prostitutes, Third, the spaces of So-Young's mothering: she adopted her baby to American when he was a infant, so she have felt guilty. Fourth, the spaces for So-young's quasi-family with Minho, a Kopian boy who was abandoned by Korean father, Dohoon, who is a poor amputee, and Tina, who is a transgender singer. Fifth, the spaces of speech of So-Young as the subaltern: the subaltern does not have the language to express its own experiences. In order to listen to the words of subaltern, we must do the task of measuring the silence. This cinematic representation of So-young as the subaltern makes her speak about her situation. Finally, the spaces constructed by the movie can be connected 'heterotopia of crisis', 'heterotopia of deviation' and 'heterotopia of fantasy'. The spaces of the movie represents lives of Others, nevertheless, So-Young's Otherness through spaces of heterotopia was transformed to an absolute Other by patriarchal traits of cinematic narrative.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.59-76
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• 2015

This paper proposes an approach in Southeast Asian studies using a post-colonial framework in the study of post-colonial Southeast Asia. This framework is based on the sociology of knowledge that analyzes the dialectical relationship between science, ideology, and discourse. Post-colonial studies is critical of the concept of universality in science and posits that a scientific statement of a society cannot stand alone, but is made by authors themselves who produce, use, and claim the so-called scientific statement. Several concepts in post-colonial theories can be used to develop area studies, i.e. colonial discourse, subaltern, mimicry, and hybridity. Therefore, this study also explores these concepts to develop a more comprehensive understanding of Southeast Asian culture. The development of post-colonial theories can be used to respond to the hegemony of social theories from Europe and the United States. The main contribution of area studies in the field of the social sciences and humanities is in revealing the hidden interests behind the universal social sciences.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.93-115
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• 2012

The decades after the French Revolution witnessed the prolific production and consumption of apocalyptic literature, tinged with the optimistic vision of political progress and human perfectibility. However, the Romantic writers were cautious to embrace the idea of the end of history, even though it promised an aesthetic space relieved of historical determinants. Mary Shelley's The Last Man joined this line of Romantic literature which skeptically questions the millenarian desires of political apocalypse by representing apocalypse without millenium. Using the theme of apocalypse as a tool to investigate the place of human beings in the universe and to test diverse political reform ideas to their fullest potential, the novel diagnoses the ideas of representative political subject as the most problematic aspect of political structure. The notion of subjecthood presupposes a political decision as to who can be counted as subject and this decision, according to the novel, assumed a subject that is "active, free, conscious and willful sovereign," which Raymond embodies in his exemplary body. Against the sovereignty of Raymond is juxtaposed the subaltern subject such as Sybil. The resistance of Sybil to Apollo, another exemplary subject, is the subtext of the novel, which guides the way out of the grim future of humanity. While the plague exemplifies the universalizing ideal with its principle of sovereignty, Sybil and her descendent Lionel practice the unconditional hospitality so that they can renew the community in a way to embrace singularities of individuals.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.18 no.8
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• pp.210-226
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• 2018

This study was to explore the life history of an elderly woman who had six times of imprisonment and entered a Samchung re-education camp. This study of life history followed the analysis of Mandelbaum(1973) pointing three perspectives of life: dimensions, turnings, and adaptations. Participant's dimensions of life were exploitation of labor, hostess life for U.S. military, prison life, Samchung re-education camp, marriage with the disabled, life of a farm worker. Turnings of life were serving as a maid, confinement of prison, life of hostess for living, being remanded to Samchung re-education camp by state violence, marriage and divorce, denial of social welfare service. Adaptations of life were downright adaptation in early life, exaggerated act in juvenile reformatory, prostituted women as a simple fortune-maker, adaption as a good wife and wise mother after marriage, resistive adaption as a self-employed. and farm worker. Based upon this results outcome, discussions and implications were suggested.

• Asian review of World Histories
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.81-112
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• 2015

This essay interrogates the category of the 'global' in the emerging domain of 'global intellectual history'. Through a case study of the Indian social-religious reformer Rammohun Roy (1772/4-1833), I argue that notions of global selfhood and rights-consciousness (which have been preoccupying concerns of recent debates in intellectual history) have multiple conceptual and practical points of origin. Thus in early colonial India a person like Rammohun Roy could invoke centuries-old Indic terms of globality (vishva, jagat, sarva, sarvabhuta, etc.), selfhood (atman/brahman), and notions of right (adhikara) to liberation/salvation (mukti/moksha) as well as late precolonial discourses on 'worldly' rights consciousness (to life, property, religious toleration) and models of participatory governance present in an Indo-Islamic society, and hybridize these with Western-origin notions of rights and liberties. Thereby Rammohun could challenge the racial and confessional assumptions of colonial authority and produce a more deterritorialized and non-sectarian idea of selfhood and governance. However, Rammohun's comparativist world-historical notions excluded other models of selfhood and globality, such as those produced by devotional Vaishnava, Shaiva, and Shakta-Tantric discourses under the influence of non-Brahmanical communities and women. Rammohun's puritan condemnation of non-Brahmanical sexual and gender relations created a homogenized and hierarchical model of globality, obscuring alternate subaltern-inflected notions of selfhood. Class, caste, and gender biases rendered Rammohun supportive of British colonial rule and distanced him from popular anti-colonial revolts and social mobility movements in India. This article argues that today's intellectual historians run the risk of repeating Rammohun's biases (or those of Hegel's Weltgeschichte) if they privilege the historicity and value of certain models of global selfhood and rights-consciousness (such as those derived from a constructed notion of the 'West' or from constructed notions of various 'elite' classicized 'cultures'), to the exclusion of models produced by disenfranchised actors across the world. Instead of operating through hierarchical assumptions about local/global polarity, intellectual historians should remain sensitive to and learn from the universalizable models of selfhood, rights, and justice produced by actors in different spatio-temporal locations and intersections.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.44 no.6
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• pp.779-796
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• 2009

Pimat-gil is a bystreet over 600-years old of Jong-no in Seoul that originated in the early Joseon Dynasty. This Study defines Pimat-gol (a street village) that has developed centering around Pimat-gil (alley) as a typical backlane of modern city, traces the origin and landscapes of Pimat-gol through the historical geographies of this place, and tries to name and interpret the placeness of Pimat-gol from the angles of social and cultural geography, particularly on the basis of the concept 'place memory'. As a result, the author extracts the placeness of Pimat-gol in terms of juxtaposition of three-fold layers, ie., 'space of subaltern vs. space of escape', 'space of oblivion vs. space of recollecttion and generation', and 'space of fossil vs. space of living'. In addition, the author examines the place memories which have been sedimented in this place and the contest of the place-memories by investigating these three-fold layers, and makes a proposal which would constructs another spatiality of modern city on the basis of this case.