KJC Korea
Journal Central

This paper grapples with the complexity of surviving the perennial relegation to object positions in international politics and conflicts. It focuses on Bosnia and Korea as sites with complicated histories engendered and kept alive by specific experiences of conflicts and intimate “post-conflict” entanglements. Through a close reading of Bosnian and Korean films, we illustrate how “post-conflict” promises of transformation ushered in by declarations that the Cold War had ended create a particular post-conflict politico-affective scene. We term this scene “postsocialist” that makes visible how a myriad of narratives, images, and expressive iterations are resonant longings and orientations towards multiple worlds foreclosed by the triumphalist post-Cold War imaginary. Interweaving Bosnian and Korean films, we argue that nostalgia and longing are dramas of adjustments that create and reconfigure the international. Building upon the work on desire and affect by Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, and Trinh Minhha, the paper proposes a new grammar for imagining, writing, and co-creating the international through a discussion of the case of slowness and being a fool in (post) conflict scenes.

Doris Lessing’s 1962 short story “To Room Nineteen,” depicts the life of an increasingly unstable protagonist, Susan, in her home. In critiquing the fact that women are confined to the space of a home embodying patriarchal ideology and order, this story reveals that they are forced to adopt only a limited number of cultural identities that society has idealized for the female sex: in this cultural climate, they are restricted to performing the gender roles, rather than creating other identities beyond gender. This story can therefore be considered a social allegory suggesting one way in which a woman who occupies the ideological space of home — the realm constructed by male desires — inevitably fails in her attempt to discover her true self and to obtain a sense of freedom. This article argues that patriarchal forces are what constantly tie the story’s heroine to the space of home and frustrate her various attempts to escape it. To show how the narrative unfolds the violent impacts of home upon the woman, despite her struggle to escape the physical boundaries of her home, this article first examines the story’s presentation of the home as a constructed space by considering critical thoughts on space and ideology, then examines each of Susan’s attempts to escape from the space of home. Each attempt shows how the space of home, with the ideology of patriarchy embedded in it, frustrates the heroine’s efforts to free herself.

This paper explores the trajectories of black manhood and fatherhood in modern and contemporary American literature and literary criticism and contemplates a possible space for “good” black fathers. As we investigate how earlier discourses and discussions on black manhood have been constructed, and have remained and developed, there certainly is a change or progress in reading and creating different types of representations of black men — without focusing too much on body and sexuality — in American literature and literary criticism, starting from a ragged image considered problematic, violent, dangerous, or bereft, and under institutionalized destitution. This denigration of the black male has intensified and solidified myths of the black family — a black matriarchal family that lacks a desirable father figure, consequently leading to the effeminized, castrated black masculine presence in their communities — but has come to be questioned, leading to a somewhat hopeful, positive, and even philosophical depiction by questioning the core of defining good and bad under the dire circumstances within which African American men find themselves. By scrutinizing innocuous, caregiving father figures dwelling at home in African American novels, this paper looks back at how literary criticism and literature itself have exercised creative power in order to give birth to the “good” black men, who were deemed nonexistent or insufficient before, through re-reading, re-tracing, and re-looking at black fathers/men in novels written by renowned literary figures from Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison to contemporary — and relatively young — authors such as Leonard Pitts Jr. and Bernice L. McFadden.

Protecting the age-old culture and body of knowledge of indigenous people has become a topical issue. Three options are usually canvassed for such — a typical western intellectual model, a typical customary law model and a sui generis model. More often than not, these options still mirror intellectual property paradigms and the reason is not far-fetched. Intellectual property generally has to do with property rights, innovation and ownership. Hence, indigenous people’s claim to ownership of their knowledge and innovations are usually associated with the canons of intellectual property. However, several views and arguments abound on the practicability of protecting indigenous knowledge with intellectual property principles. The literature addresses themes such as catering for the spiritual elements of indigenous knowledge, originality requirement, public domain concerns, among others. Instructively, little or nothing has been done on analyzing the philosophical undertone behind these arguments. By way of contributing to knowledge, this paper presents five underlying perspectives that frame divergent views in the debate on protecting indigenous knowledge — subjective descriptions of property, views on authorship, views of cultural orthodoxy versus cultural pluralism, Vermeylen’s legalistic and anthropological approaches and optimism of the modern era. Like a matrix, set of theoretical principles and founding philosophies of thoughts, these inter-related perspectives directly and inadvertently shape various articulations, propositions and deliberations on the subject. This paper engages this discourse outlining precisely what these underlying perspectives are, whilst also noting their relative strength and flaws. It is expected that this will present future researchers with a clear philosophical categorization of arguments in the debate on indigenous knowledge protection.

This article explores the creation and representations of the sexual other (also labeled as a sexual deviant or sex addict) created in the reality TV show Celebrity Rehab: Sex Rehab, the repression of sexual expression, and lastly the “recovery” and the role the confessional plays in trying to lift the silence surrounding the sexual other. This article focuses on the voyeuristic gratification that derives from the viewing of sexual confessions and the identification process as ‘normal’ through the ability to label someone an ‘other’ by their sexual practices. Through the use of Homi K. Bhabha’s work on “modes of representation of otherness” (68), this text explores how the identification of the sexual other can eliminate the ‘deviant’ label that surrounds sex and sexuality — especially when the conversation is in an open forum instead of behind closed doors. Reality television allows viewers to maintain power within the viewer-subject relationship; it also provides the audience an opportunity to label or remove labels placed on those operating outside heterosexual norms as deviant or ‘other.’ Finally, this text explores the power of the confessional — its ability to aid in the removal of the ‘otherness’ label and to open up dialogue surrounding the “taboo” associated with sexual practices (and speaking about it) within American culture.

A few of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films have become touchstones for their ecocritical and geographical content, but Mirror (Zerkalo, 1975) has, for the most part, been left out of environmental conversations. From its opening images and lines of dialogue, however, the film maps a number of striking possibilities about the role of landscape and objects in relation to both the human characters and the film audience. Throughout its duration, there can be found sections of film that continue to play after the characters leave the frame. These could be called “empty” frames or “dead” time, but upon closer inspection they reveal themselves to be full of life, movement, and even depict what I call micronarratives, small-scale stories told by objects and environments themselves. These sometimes act in isolation, and other times involve the human figure in decentering ways. Using phenomenology and neo-formalism to investigate a number of moments of divergence from the anthropocentric narrative, I show that the film can be seen to point towards what Adrian Ivakhiv terms a biomorphic perspective that creates rare modes of sight and participation through the involvement and interaction of entities often considered to be within separate categories (e.g. living and nonliving). Tarkovsky leverages cinema’s distinctive combination of image, movement, time, and the illusion of space to allow viewers to notice what might otherwise remain overlooked or invisible. The paper draws on the work of philosophers, film theorists, ecocritics, and Tarkovsky scholars, especially Ivakhiv, Gaston Bachelard, David George Menard, and Tarkovsky’s own writings. “Objects in the Mirror” promotes dialogue between the discourses of ecocinema, landscape, phenomenology, and film theory by demonstrating a cinema’s ability to question the assumed hierarchy of content within the profilmic event