A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group Meeting: Featuring Madeleine Han

Presented by the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group. Hosted by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. 

REGISTRATION (open to all graduate students)

The A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group hosts a workshop featuring A/P/A Institute Research Affiliate Madeleine Han (PhD candidate, Yale University) who will present their dissertation chapter, “Beyond Witness: Kijich’on Art as Infrastructure, Tactic, Care.” Lunch will be served.

The meeting is open to all graduate students working in and around the field of A/P/A Studies.

NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to graduate students from NYU and nearby universities. Registration is required. Non-NYU guests may be asked to present a government issued photo ID. NYU guests must present their NYU ID.

Accessibility note: This venue has an elevator and is accessible for wheelchair users. There are single-stall, all gender restrooms available. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.

Madeleine Han, “Beyond Witness: Kijich’on Art as Infrastructure, Tactic, Care”

Contemporary art is rarely considered to be constitutive of processes of militarization and demilitarization. Yet in South Korea, art and cultural development have played a crucial role in narrating the past, present, and future of the nation’s so-called kijich’ons, or camptowns, referring to commercial and residential districts that form around US military bases to cater to the soldiering clientele. Over the past two decades, the United States and the Republic of Korea have pursued the consolidation of the local US military presence, resulting in the slated return of over fifty percent of land granted to the US military to the South Korean government. This restructuring has initiated rapid economic and political shifts in former military base host cities. At once crucial for raking in dollars for the national economy following the Korean War ceasefire and stigmatized for their association with the militarized sex trade, racial conflict, and vice, kijich’ons also yield their own spatial and sensorial regimes. This presentation explores the role that contemporary site-based art and cultural development play in shaping how the legacies of kijich’ons are sensed, and made sense of, in this present window of restructuring, return, and transition.

Madeleine Han is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale University. Their dissertation explores the cultural, memorial, and spatial politics surrounding US military camptowns in South Korea. Their research has received support from the Korea Foundation, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, Yale MacMillan Center, Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM), and International Center for Korean Studies (ICKS), housed within the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University.

Image: Gyeonggi Province official blog site.