Performing Transpacific Grief: Postmemory and Imagined Homelands in Julia Cho’s "99 Histories" and "Aubergine"

Professor Hayana Kim (DEALL) will present a talk titled "Performing Transpacific Grief: Postmemory and Imagined Homelands in Julia Cho’s 99 Histories (2005) and Aubergine (2017)." This is a work in progress she is sharing with faculty and graduate students in hopes of receiving feedback toward publication of an article. All interested faculty and graduate students are welcome. 

​What does homeland mean for second generation children in an immigrant family? How does one search for their homelands when the history of their parents is not known? This talk examines two plays in the Korean diaspora, Julia Cho’s 99 Histories (2005) and Aubergine (2017), spotlighting Cho’s signature stage aesthetics that enliven ghostly matters to pulsate before the eyes of the audience. The two plays are significant not only for its respective focus on the relationship between mother and daughter and father and son in an immigrant family; rather, they both envelop the characters in an enchanting stage, where the hard lines between history, fiction, and imagination dissolve, allowing for multiple planes of realities to bleed into each other in dramatizing the journey to search for imagined homelands. This is perhaps why Cho likens the job of playwright as that of mudang, or shamans that call up spirits and ghosts to make them (re)appear in the present. Taking the cue from Cho’s words to extend them into theories on postmemory, performativity, and transpacific studies, Kim argues that 99 Histories and Aubergine present a magical space to reckon with transpacific grief—an entrancing space where the past and present is made porous in an intergenerational family history, turning life and death into a twin and a mirror of each other, thereby demonstrating the possibility to open up the passageways between the living and the dead in the Korean diaspora.

RSVPs are requested: 

RSVP here. 

Dr. Hayana Kim is an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Languages at Ohio State. Her research and teaching are at the intersections of theatre, performance, Korean, and Korean diasporic studies.

This event is free, open to the public and welcoming to everyone.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Ethnic Studies, the Department of East Asian Languages and Learning and the Humanities Institute.