**Rescheduled** Between the National & the Exotic: Settler Colonial Ideology & Infrastructure in Korea
**This talk, originally planned for 10/13/23, will be rescheduled to a later date**
Abstract: This project uses a settler colonial framework to examine how the arrivals of US capital and culture coincided in Korea, and the ways this has shaped Korea’s society, landscape, and political economy, particularly since the 1970s. I research the development of the overlapping military, tourism, and film industries in Korea to index the prevalence of Native American stereotypes, western frontier imagery, and island paradise exoticism in relation to South Korea’s neoliberal capitalist expansion. Through this analysis I demonstrate that the imposed tripartite division of Korea into the primitive north, the civilized south, and a pseudo-Polynesian island paradise is based in US-centric settler colonial ideology and economic structures.
About the Speaker
Eunha Jeong Wood is a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in the Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies PhD program with graduate minors in American Indian & Indigenous Studies (AIIS) and Development Studies & Social Change (DSSC). Eunha researches decolonization, indigeneity, global political economy, and imperialism in the contexts of Mni Sota and Korea through a framework of dialectical & historical materialism and cultural studies.