A River Called Han

Theater and Performance

SPEAKER: Christine Mok, University of Rhode Island

This talk thinks through the site of the Hangang or Han River in Hansol Jung’s play Among the Dead and poems by Catherine Kim (Harvard ’18), E.J. Koh, and Don Mee Choi to explore transpacific entanglements of han (한), the postcolonial Korean structure of feeling that names the grief and resentment of racialized, ethnic, national, and historical memory. The Hangang cuts across Seoul, the capital of South Korea, dividing the city, north and south, along an ecological twin to the 38th parallel, which divides the country, a “maritime DMZ” demarcating North and South Korea. Historically strategic, the river and its control made and unmade empires and dynasties. Though 27 bridges now interconnect the metropolis, in 1950, on the eve of the Korean War, there was only one crossing. The Hangang Bridge, and its bombing on June 28, 1950, to hamper North Korean advance is a central setting for Jung, Kim, Koh, and Choi in works that stage han as the life and afterlife of empire.  The possibility to bridge past and present, parents and children, Korean and American, are set against the geologic time of the Han River and the geopolitical timelines of the Forgotten War, a forever war with only an armistice and no end.

About the Speaker

Christine Mok is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Rhode Island. She has published in Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Modern Drama, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. She is co-editor with Joshua Chambers-Letson of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital (Bloomsbury, 2021). She is currently completing her first book project, which charts a genealogy of Asian American performance as an un-disciplining aesthetic and political strategy to imagine affiliation in inauthenticity.