The East Asian Studies Center presents:
"Migrant Crash"
Joseph Jonghyun Jeon
University of California, Irvine
Abstract: This paper examines Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s acclaimed 2021 film, Drive My Car, and in particular its ostensibly celebratory depiction of migration (to South Korea) at the end of the film. This unlikely shift in scenery ambivalently straddles two very different forms of transnational flow, conflating in the manner of fantasy the freedom of commodity and capital movement across borders and that of unencumbered human migration. In so doing, the scene expresses an otherwise a repressed fact in contemporary migration discourse, that the current crisis that we see at various borders around the world between the Global North and South bears a material relationship to the histories of extraction that have characterized such geopolitical relations, be it in the form of colonial tribute or neo-imperial free trade hegemony. The sublimated migrant figure at the end of Drive My Car thus indexes a broader problematic of contemporary migration, in which the figure of the migrant remains suspended in a kind of abeyance, be it the result of uncertain documentation or actual detention at a border. This condition in turn helps elaborate an important fault line for conceiving of the future in East Asia at a historical moment characterized by geopolitical reorganization where economies built on export businesses must increasingly reconcile free trade logics with ethnonationalist calls for more restrictive borders.
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Joseph Jonghyun Jeon is Director of the Center for Critical Korean Studies and Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, with appointments in Asian American Studies, Film and Media Studies, and Culture and Theory. He is the author of Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry (Iowa, 2012); Vicious Circuits: Korea’s IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century (Stanford, 2019); and Bong Joon Ho: Global Entanglements (Illinois, forthcoming) His work has been published in Critical Inquiry, Representations, Cinema Journal, Journal of Asian American Studies, and positions.
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This event is supported by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.
