The Institute for Korean Studies presents:
Transhistorical Mourning in Korean Diasporic Poetry: Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony
Ivana Sang Een Yi
Cornell University
Abstract: Taking a transtemporal and transpacific approach, this paper examines Korean American poet Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony (National Book Award winner, 2020) in relation to leading contemporary Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s Chugŭmŭi chasajŏn (Autobiography of Death, 2016). I analyze Kim Hyesoon’s book as a 21st century form of muga, songs traditionally sung by female shamans to help the souls of the dead enter the afterlife. In the rite for the dead that Kim creates for those who perished in the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster, Kim’s polyvocal speaker engages the embodied memory of individuals to voice the transhistorical grief of the Korean community. The paper contends that the grief Kim conveys extends to the Korean diaspora and interprets DMZ Colony as a (post)colonial lament that draws on the oral tradition to articulate collective mourning across the Pacific.
Ivanna Sang Een Yi is an Assistant Professor of Korea Studies at Cornell University. As a scholar of Korean literature, culture, and performance, her research focuses on the performative dimensions of living oral traditions as they interact with written literature and the environment from the late Chosŏn period to the present. She has published on subjects including contemporary Korean poetry, the relationship of p’ansori and the more-than-human world, and the storying of land in the Indigenous oral traditions of the Americas, in venues such as the Journal of Korean Studies, the Journal of World Literature, and The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature. She currently serves as chair of the executive committee of the Korean Language, Literature, and Culture (LLC) Forum of the Modern Language Association.