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.

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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

사유의 밤 / La Nuit des Idées
Quand : lun. 29/01/2018 18:30 - 20:30
Où : 광화문 교보빌딩 23층, 컨벤션홀
사유의 밤
권력의 상상력 : 한반도의 과도기와  비평 사상/ 인문학

시놉시스:
세월호 참사부터 박근혜 전대통령 파면에 이르기까지 근래의 사건들은 «한국판 68혁명» 이라고도 평가되며, 한국의 역사적인 순간에 대해 되짚어보게 합니다. 인문사회학 분야의 여러 전문가들과 함께하는 이번 토론회는 남한의 «촛불 혁명», 북한의 김정은 시대와 같은 «한반도의 과도기»에 대해 생각해보고, 이로 인해 어떤 변화들이 이루어졌는지 자문해보며, 한국 사회를 관통하는 이슈들을 탐구하고, 새로운 패러다임의 출현에 대해 고찰해보는 시간이 될 것입니다.

이 역동적인 한반도의 현대성을 철학자, 사회학자, 인류학자, 역사학자, 기자들은 어떻게 해석할까요? 이 질문에 대해 의견을 교환하는 토론의 밤에 여러분을 초대합니다.

토론자:
임지현, 역사학자, 서강대학교
이기상, 철학자
벤자맹 주아노, 인류학자,  홍익대학교
장경섭, 사회학자, 서울대학교

프랑스해외문화예술진흥원(Institut français)이 시작한 « 사유의 밤 »은 현대 사상을 논하고 국제적으로 사유를 공유하는 대규모 행사로서 동일한 주제에 대해 전 세계의 지식인, 연구원, 예술가 및 국제 지도자들이 의견을 나누는 장입니다. 올해 행사는 68혁명 이후 반세기가 지난 이 시점에서, « 권력의 상상력 »이라는 주제에 대해 되묻습니다.

« 사유의 밤 » 관련 모든 프로그램은 다음 사이트를 참조해주세요 : www.lanuitdesidees.com

*한불 동시통역 진행
*신청: http://www.institutfrancais-seoul.com/ko/portfolio-item/%EC%82%AC%EC%9C%A0%EC%9D%98-%EB%B0%A4/

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La Nuit des Idées

L’imagination au pouvoir : peut-on parler d’un « moment coréen » ?

Synopsis:
Les évènements récents en Corée du Sud, de la tragédie du ferry Sewol à la destitution de la présidente Park Geun-hye en mars 2017, nous amènent à réfléchir à ce moment de l’histoire coréenne, qui a pu être qualifié par certains journalistes de « Mai 68 coréen ». Au travers de cette table-ronde, réunissant des spécialistes de différentes sciences humaines et sociales, il s’agira de penser ce « moment coréen », que l’on a pu également qualifier de « révolution des bougies » au Sud et qui correspond au Nord à l’ère Kim Jong-un, de questionner les changements profonds dont il est le révélateur, et de s’interroger sur l’apparition d’un changement de paradigme. S’agirait-il de l’entrée dans une nouvelle modernité coréenne ?

Qu’est-ce que philosophes, sociologues, anthropologues, historiens et journalistes ont à nous dire sur cette modernité coréenne en mouvement ? C’est à une soirée de discussions et d’échanges autour de cette question que nous vous convions.

Intervenants:
M. Lim Jie-Hyun, historien, Sogang University
M. Lee Ki-Sang, philosophe, Hankuk University of Foreign Study
M. Benjamin Joinau, anthropologue, Hongik University
M. Chang Kyung-Sup, sociologue, Seoul National University
A propos de la Nuit des Idées

Grand rendez-vous dédié à la pensée contemporaine et au partage international des idées, LA NUIT DES IDEES est un évènement mondial initié et coordonné par l’Institut français réunissant intellectuels, chercheurs, artistes ou encore responsables internationaux autour d’un même thème. Le thème de l’année 2018, « L’imagination au pouvoir », invite à réinterroger ce slogan un demi-siècle après les évènements de Mai 68 en France.

Toute la programmation de la Nuit des Idées est en ligne sur www.lanuitdesidees.com

*Interprétation simultanée français/coréen
*Evènement gratuit, sur inscription obligatoire: http://www.institutfrancais-seoul.com/portfolio-item/nuit-des-idees/

https://www.facebook.com/events/215430222364475/
 

I will be a discussant at the 2nd Shinhan University international conference on Friday 12 November, held at Art Sonje (Seoul). This year theme is  “Borderlands for the Peaceful Coexistence in Korea and Beyond".

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.

Yongusil 33: The Sun, the Arrow, and Benjamin Joinau
BY ROBERT WINSTANLEY-CHESTERS | MAY 07, 2014 | 
Click on the title to see the original article.

As academics and analysts, we read a large track of material and attend a large number of workshops, conferences, and other such intellectual gatherings. At the Sixth World Congress of Korean Studies in September of 2012, held at the idyllic Academy of Korean Studies in Seongnam, I heard a conference presentation that stopped me in my conceptual tracks and supported a dizzying connectivity between concepts I had previously absorbed and historical material I was currently processing for my own doctoral dissertation.

Benjamin Joinau of EHESS, Paris delivered a presentation entitled “The Sun and the Arrow: A Topo-myth Analysis of Pyongyang” that turned my head. Joinau utilized the core analytical tool box of psycho-geography while coupling it to an acute sense of space and place akin to the most urgent and forthright of an anthropologically minded activist: urban geographers.

Pyongyang lived and breathed in Joinau’s presentation, its histoire and terroire vibrating in conjoined narratological connection. Methodologically activated through a spatialization of Durrand’s diurnal and nocturnal mythodology via James Duncans’s socio-semiotoics, Joinau’s psycho-geographic reconfiguration of urban Pyongyang’s physical and spiritual axes was extraordinary. We watched and listened as he revisioned the construction and organization of the physical spaces of Pyongyang from those previous and historically familiar, grounded first in the needs and structures of the Yi dynasty, (“Pyongyang retained the dense and diversified fabric of its ancient origins….”) and secondarily in the co-option, ambition, and coloniality of Imperial Japan and submissive Chosun, through the disruption and destruction of war to new, more assertive re-orderings undertaken at the behest of revolution.

Pyongyang and North Korea’s revolution was to play out in its urban geography, ”etching the official ideology… into the city’s layout.” It was to be commemorated in monolith and edifice and writ large in monumentality. This was urban geography manifesting not only revolution and ambition, but inherently and almost primarily glory. Joinau has envisaged an urban landscape and landscapes of actuated, embedded, acute glorification. Here a geographic and “ideological polygon” form axes of orientation echoing what Joinau terms “the sun” and the arrow.” Pyongyang is thus seen as a city “… symbolically and politically under the… eye of the Father, the Sun on Earth.”

Joinau’s work through this intriguing interplay of symbol, semiotics, mythos, and cityscape provides a fascinating physical urban echo to Heonik Kwon and Byung-ho Chung’s more theoretic conceptualization of a North Korean politics of theatrics and charisma. Joinau has surely produced the vital kernel of what must be an absolutely key work of scholarship addressing the impact of politics and mythic narratology upon the physical landscapes of urban environment, twinning in the wake of Kwon and Chung, urban glory with charismatic rurality.

The piece can be found in the new issue of the Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies (part of SungkyunKwan University in Seoul’s Academy of East Asian Studies), edited by the esteemed Dutch Koreanist Boudewijn Walraven.