Missing/Disappearing Bodies and Forgotten Geographies: A Korean Argentine Diasporic Viewing of Im Heung-soon՛s Good Light, Good Air

Gwangju Uprising Mural at Chonnam National University (left); Archivo Hasenberg-Quaretti (right)

Dr. Junyoung Verónica Kim, New York University

Monday, April 28, 2025
4:00 PM

Bunche Hall, Rm 10383

On April 30th, 1977, 14 mothers sent a letter asking the military dictator Jorge Rafael Videla for the whereabouts of their disappeared children and began to gather in silent protest in the Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires. Known as the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, this spurred a mass movement that continues today. Around the same time, on May 18th, 1980, citizens of Gwangju, South Korea, launched a mass resistance movement against the dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan. The South Korean military retaliated in full force resulting in the massacre and disappearance of thousands of Gwangju citizens. The connections and intimacies between the overlapping histories of these two cities demonstrate the ways in which Global South countries were violently conscripted into dirty wars against communism. Despite the explicit linkages, why are the histories of these two places (cities and nations) studied separately––divided and separated by discrete disciplinary boundaries? How does insurgent memory both disrupt dominant historical national narratives and yoke together these two geographies/histories/futurities? Moreover, how does the present absence of the missing in Gwangju and the desaparecidos (disappeared) in Buenos Aires haunt the urban geographies that are shaped through the ordinary violence of gentrification and urban development? Engaging in a reading of Im Heung-soon’s documentary and video installation Good Light, Good Air (2020), this talk explores the multiple vectors and scales of transpacific connectivity. By adopting Eyal Weizman’s conceptualization of forensic architecture, Dr. Junyoung Verónica Kim contends that the ruins, holes, and missing parts of both the material (bodies and urban geographies) and the epistemic (archives, knowledge production, disciplinary formation) demonstrate what cannot be visiblized or seen otherwise. In situating the Gwangju Uprising and the Argentine dirty war as part and parcel of the diasporic, Dr. Kim proposes that paying attention to Korean-Latin American intimacies offers a possibility of fabulating a decolonial and demilitarized world. 

Dr. Junyoung Verónica Kim a visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University. Her interdisciplinary research examines how settler militarism, imperialism, and racial capitalism intersect in East Asia and Latin America and across hemispheric Asian American diasporas. She has published on Korean immigration in Argentina, the Global South project, Transpacific Studies, Asian-Latin American literature, and Latin American involvement during the Korean War.  Dr. Kim is on the editorial board for the book series “Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia” for Palgrave Macmillian, and “Between Asias and Americas” for University of Pittsburgh Press, and serves on the executive committees of numerous scholarly organizations. She is a core member of the “Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective” and an associate member of the Korea Policy Institute. Her book in progress–Cacophonous Intimacies: Reorienting Diaspora and Race in Asia-Latin America– centers Asian diaspora(s) in Latin America and reveals the intimacies between seemingly disparate histories of multiple imperialisms, hemispheric American settler colonialism, and postcolonial nation building in both East Asia and Latin America. Currently, she has also started working on a new monograph tentatively titled Nuclear Diaspora: Asian-Latin American Genealogies, the Black Pacific, and the Korean War, as well as co-editing a special issue of positions: asia critique on "The Transpacific Korean War."    

Sponsor(s): Center for Korean Studies