In Reencounters, Crystal Mun-hye Baik examines what it means to live with and remember an ongoing war when its manifestations—hypervisible and deeply sensed—become everyday formations delinked from militarization. Contemplating beyond notions of inherited trauma and postmemory, Baik offers the concept of reencounters to better track the Korean War’s illegible entanglements through an interdisciplinary archive of diasporic memory works that includes oral history projects, performances, and video installations rarely examined by Asian American studies scholars.Baik shows how Korean refugee migrations are repackaged into celebrated immigration narratives, how transnational adoptees are reclaimed by the South Korean state as welcomed “returnees,” and how militarized colonial outposts such as Jeju Island are recalibrated into desirable tourist destinations. Baik argues that as the works by Korean and Korean/American artists depict this Cold War historiography, they also offer opportunities to remember otherwise the continuing war.

Crystal Mun-hye Baik (she/her) is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Professor Baik is the co-director of the Memory and Resistance Laboratory (MEM-RES) at UCR; a core member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective; and a co-editor of the Critical Militarization Studies book series at University of Michigan Press. She is the author of Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique (Temple University Press, 2020) and is currently working on a creative nonfiction book based on oral histories with Korean diasporic activists.

Co-sponsored by: Public History Initiative (PHI), East Asia Program (EAP), Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies (FGSS), Latina/o Studies, and departments of Asian Studies, History, and Performing & Media Arts (PMA) Part of the "Critical Moves: Performance in Theory & Movement" Series