15 June 2018 | 14:30 | ISCAP Library
ABSTRACT
In recent years, South Korea has experienced significant changes in popular discourse about the North. Until the advent of the so-called “Sunshine Policy”, Southern portraits of North Koreans had been largely monochromatic, treating counterparts across the 38th Parallel as evil Communists or brainwashed automatons. From the turn of the millennium, though, previously unimaginable depictions of North Korea and North Koreans emerged. In this talk, Stephen Epstein will discuss such striking recent trends in South Korean popular culture as films that feature North Korean spies as sympathetically treated protagonists and television shows that feature North Korean defectors in order to illuminate how South Korea collectively imagines its estranged sibling, a nation that is currently commanding the world’s attention.
Bionote
Associate Professor Stephen J Epstein is the Director of the Asian Languages & Cultures Programme at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and served as the 2013-14 President of the New Zealand Asian Studies Society. He has published widely on contemporary Korean society, literature and popular culture and translated numerous pieces of Korean and Indonesian fiction. He has also co-produced two documentaries on the Korean indie music scene, Us & Them: Korean Indie Rock in a K-pop world (2014) and Our Nation: A Korean Punk Rock Community (2002).
