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After Torture: The Cultural Politics of Forgiveness
Date: Thursday, 17 Jan 2013 Time: 12:40 pm to 2:00 pm Location: 145 Natural Sciences Building
Description
Dr. Youngju Ryu from University of Michigan speaks about the representations of torture abound in contemporary South Korean literature, film, and art. As reflections on both the country's authoritarian past and the persistence of that past in the present, these representations open up torture as a charged site of investigating the task of achieving what political scientist Choi Jang-jip has called "democracy after democratization." Torture thus becomes linked not only to a specific object of power such as the dictator in his labyrinth, but of a modality of power that forecloses or displaces the question of justice from proper consideration. After discussing the South Korean case, the talk will consider the problem of torture more globally in relation to democracy, human rights, and the possibility of politics beyond the prism of "political correctness."
