Diasporic Condition: Jane Jin Kaisen’s Strange Meetings And Its Tracing Of Ambiguous Colonial Vestiges

ABSTRACT

Jane Jin Kaisen’s 2017 video work, Strange Meetings, documents the inside and surroundings of a former STD (sexually transmittable disease) treatment center for prohibiting the spread of STD among the U.S. GIs as part of the “Clean-Up Campaign” during the 1970s, located near Soyo Mountain in Dongducheon-si, South Korea. This essay questions how the figure of diaspora expressed through art helps trace the contemporary vestiges of colonial violence, and raises a fundamental question to the notion of national community. I argue that Strange Meetings critically revisits South Korea’s nationalist historiography by foregrounding a metaphor of diaspora that, according to Stuart Hall, while signaling its “permanent instability” as a historical marker, exceeds binary structures of representation: such as, literal/figurative, past/present, and them/us. In Strange Meetings, diasporic identities are kaksŏri, a cross-dressed wandering performer, a “vocal” survivor of the camp town prostitution, and the art work itself that is multidimensional, alterable, and globetrotting installation – all of which, I conceptualize borrowing Ann L. Stoler’s terms, constitute “ambiguous colonial vestiges.” The attempts to find fault of the nationalist and misogynous hegemony from within, especially through subaltern voices, have been greatly constrained in South Korea since the Korean War (1950–3). Strange Meetings, however, shows that when they are set in motion, they lend one of the most powerful impetuses for the feminist critique against the intimate tie between the U.S.’s neocolonial occupation of South Korea and Korean patriarchal nationalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Jane Jin Kaisen
• Strange Meetings
• Clean-Up Campaign
• STD treatment center
• U.S. camp town prostitution in South Korea
• kaksŏri
• diasporic condition
• ambiguous colonial vestiges

Notes

¹ Because of the unfair agreement of the U.S.-South Korea Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) enacted in 1967, (revised in 1991 and 2001), when U.S. servicemen murder, rape, or assault Korean citizens, the U.S. government has the upper hand on deciding to which country’s court exercises criminal jurisdiction over the accused.

² Stoler explains why she prefers the terms “colonial studies” or “(post)colonial studies” to “postcolonialism”: “In arguing for a recursive history and the uneven sedimentation of colonial practices in the present, I intend to retain the ‘post’ as a mark of skepticism rather than assume its clarity” (Stoler, 2016, Preface ix).

³ In 2018, Incheon City was berated by a number of people for its policy to financially support sex workers for this reason. National Petition to the President, “We Are against the Financial Support for the Sex Workers,” the start of the petition, August 14, 2018, the end of it, September 13, 2018, https://www1.president.go.kr/petitions/340819.