The Institute for Korean Studies presents:
"Translation as Cultural Decolonization: North Korea's 'Selected World Literature' Project, 1960-1967"
Kyeong Hee-Choi
University of Chicago
Abstract: Prevailing colonial and postcolonial studies in the West have afforded little space for addressing the complexities of Korea's colonial experience, subsequent national division, and their consequences. Addressing an under-explored area, this study investigates a case of postcolonial reckoning with colonial legacies wherein building literary infrastructure through translation served as an institutional framework for cultural decolonization. The focus is North Korea's state-sponsored "Selected World Literature" project from 1960 to 1967. By analyzing the material and human resources devoted to this systematic literary initiative, the research reveals how curating and translating world literature became a means for North Korea to address colonial cultural deficits within the broader socialist revolutionary project; it argues for a dimension of postcoloniality often overshadowed in conventional understandings of both translation and North Korea. This presentation draws upon a collaborative work with Moon-seok Jang (Professor of Korean Literature, Kyung Hee University).
Kyeong-Hee Choi (Ph.D. English, Indiana University) is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Modern Korean Literature at the University of Chicago. Her research and teaching explore the intersection of gender, publication control, and modernity in Korean-language literary and cultural texts, encompassing New Womanhood, motherhood, disability, collaboration issues, and Japanese colonial censorship practices in Korea. Choi founded the North American Workshop on Korean Literature (NAOKOL) in 2008, which later became the Korean Literature Association (KLA). Her professional service includes membership in the founding editorial collective of positions, the editorial board of Public Culture, the executive board of the MLA Korean Language & Literature Forum, and the MLA Publications Committee. Among her current research topics are life trajectories of colonial censors, censors' documents and censored texts, North Korea's world literature projects, and the return of Kim San and Nym Wales' Song of Ariran (1941) to East Asia.
