科研成果详情

Considering a series of theoretical perspectives in memory studies, this essay uses the notion of the retrospective glance to pierce through the historical oblivion and selective forgetting to which a minority group, Koryo saram, has been subjected throughout a silence imposed by the Cold War and the historical inertia caused by globalization. The essay raises related questions regarding the meaning of a diaspora in the absence of an origin as well as about the significance of memory as a public and private act. At the core of the retrospective glance deployed in Soyoung Kim's visual Exile Trilogy, which is devoted to the Koryo Diaspora, lies a quest to illuminate the blind spots of representation as a "standing for the other" and the desire to represent that defies a Western-centric trauma-studies perspective.