Category: Colloquium

East Asian Comics Conference

9/27/2021

I present a paper on South Korean comics Friday 15th October, at 11h20 (French local time).

This international conference investigates comics as a form developed in the East Asia geographical and cultural area. With presentations approaching the evolution of comics art in Japan, South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Vietnam, the conference will consider the particularities of East Asian countries comics regarding their history, styles, medium transformations and political situation. The presentations will also give the opportunity to reflect on the interactions between those distinct comics traditions, as well as on their circulation abroad.

During the conference, some presentations will be held in person, first at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris on Thursday 14th October, then at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon on Friday 15th October. Others will be held virtually via Zoom, where the entire event will also be broadcasted. The link to the virtual event will be released soon. To attend the conference physically, the entry is free at the Quai Branly Museum (capacity of 70 persons) and you shall enroll for the ENS de Lyon (capacity of 19 persons) by [email protected]. Health pass will be required. Papers will be presented either in French or in English.

Download the program here

Presentation on Pyongyang, EFEO/RASK Colloquium, April 19th

4/3/2018

I will do a presentation on Pyongyang at the EFEO/RASK Colloquium in Seoul April 19th:

Centre de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient à Séoul Colloquium on Korean Studies/ANR CITY_NKOR (2) City, urban planning and architecture in North Korea

The April 2018 session of the Seoul Colloquium in Korean Studies, organized jointly by the Seoul Center of the EFEO, RAS Korea and the Asiatic Research Institute, Korea University, will be held on Thursday April 19 in the Grand Conference Room (Room number 310), of the Asiatic Research Institute, Korea University, beginning at 6:00 pm.

Benjamin Joinau
Regimes of visibility in Pyongyang: notes for an ethnographic fieldwork on public spaces and monumentality in DPRK

Benjamin Joinau will use the concept of "regimes of visibility" to examine the illocutionary and contextual dimension of the various monumental visibilities that one encounters in the city of Pyongyang. By way of this analysis, I hope to contribute to the semiology of spatial forms expressing systems of ideological values, treating the capital, in particular, as a centrality that territorializes the spectacularity of government.

Benjamin Joinau is a doctor of Cultural Anthropology specialized in Korean Studies. He is an associate researcher of the Center of Korean Studies (CRC) at EHESS, Paris, and assistant professor at Hongik University, Seoul. He has been living and working in South Korea since 1994. His Ph.D. thesis has analyzed the regimes of otherness in Korean cinema. Through the hermeneutics of cinema and now of urban materials, he is exploring the representations and the practices in the Korean public sphere (regimes of visibility/invisibility in cityscapes, urban agriculture micro-practices, semiology of spatial forms, etc.). He has published several articles and books in French, English and Korea. He is also the director of the publishing company Atelier des Cahiers (www.atelierdescahiers.com) and the winner of the 2014 France-Korea Cultural Prize. Personal Website : www.benjaminjoinau.com

From Korea University station (line 6), take exit 1, go to the right, up the sloping walkway to the campus. Walk past the building with the Ilmin Museum (the first building you'll see almost in front of you, a little to the left), and continue walking straight up the hill until you reach the Asiatic Research Institute on the right. After 6 pm the front door of the Institute will be locked, so please try to arrive a little earlier. If the door is locked, phone to the EFEO Seoul Center (02-921-4526) so that we can let you into the building.

Elisabeth Chabanol

Presentation at intl symposium in Paris

10/18/2015

I will make a presentation on South Korean cinema and the regimes of otherness at the International Symposium "Regards croisés sur le cinéma coréen" Thursday 22nd october at Ecole nationale Louis Lumière in Paris.

Representation of borders in South Korean cinema

10/9/2015

This is the PPT of my presentation at the Shinhan university conference "Crossing the Division and Borders" (2015 October 15th, Seoul).

"Crossing the Division and Borders" conference

10/4/2015

This week, Wednesday 7th and Thursday 8th October, at the conference "Crossing the Division and Borders" organized by Shinhan University, at Kintex (Ilsan), I will moderate a session Thursday morning and present a paper the afternoon about the representation of the border in South Korean cinema.

The Representation of the borders in Korean cinema (1998-present)

Cinema is an ideal material for the analysis of heterological discourse in society. In South and North Korea, collective imaginary has been defined after 1945 by the Cold War and the division, shaping what has been called the “partition culture”. In this closed context, the figure of the Other has only been developed in a restrained manner, the ghost-like and obsessive presence of the neighbor/feuding brother almost limiting heterology to a sole variation on the figure of the alter as the opposing other of the self. But the Sunshine Policy era (1998-2008), which initiated a decade of dialogue between the two countries, accompanied with the Korean Wave phenomenon, also witnessed a tremendous change in these representations in South Korea. Slowly emerged in movies more complex regimes of otherness, which not only enriched the figure of the North Korean other, but also made room for other others to appear. In this heterological discourse developed by popular culture products such as films, the border is not only a material line separating two states. It is a specific symbolic device which articulates the South Korean collective psyche with the North, with the world and even with itself, following a series of defined tropes. This article wishes to assess these diversified symbolic functions given to the border and the frontier in contemporary South Korean imaginary. This study, for the sake of unity, will focus on twenty movies produced during and after the Sunshine Policy era.

Kyujanggak 8th International Symposium on Korean Studies

8/26/2015

I had the pleasure to discuss two exciting papers, Lee Seung-Ah's (UCLA) on Yi Sun-shin representations in popular culture, and Elli Kim's (UCLA) on South Korean action spy movies after 2008.

The 8th Kyujanggak International Symposium on Korean Studies

Title : The Contemporary Relevance of Document Culture: Knowledge, Media, Power
Date : 25(Tue) - 26(Wed) August, 2015
Venue : Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies, School of law, Seoul National University

Seoul National University Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies will be hosting the 8th annual Kyujanggak International Symposium on Korean Studies from Tuesday 25 August to Wednesday 26 August 2015. This year, the symposium will focus on the topic of “The Contemporary Relevance of Document Culture: Knowledge, Media, Power.”

Documents are not just a historical legacy that reflects past ideas or mentalities; they also give rise continuously to new interpretations, and sometimes even interact with historical memories and serve to reshape them. The purpose of this symposium is therefore to question the contemporary implications of the documentary heritage of Korea. Historical changes in the meaning of recording or producing documents; the manifold social tensions that exist between recording and remembering; the diversity and connotations of various new media for recording history; problems and controversies surrounding the interpretation of historical records; the specificity of the Korean documentary heritage in its global context; these are just some of the subthemes that could be explored.

For this purpose, we have invited scholars from around the world to share their thoughts on various agendas surrounding the main theme.