#  The Birth of a (Korean) Nation (in Mexico): Cacophonous Intimacies and Transpacific Entanglements in Kim Young-ha’s Black Flower 

 



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####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **April 3, 2025** 

 04:30PM - 06:30PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Thomas Chan-Soo Kang Room (S050), CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138**  



 

 [ here arrow\_circle\_right ](https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwrf-itrDssGddj930bmz9gPRmOTxF3ulsu) 

 



 

*SBS Seminar*

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**Junyoung Verónica Kim**  
Visiting Scholar, Asian/Pacific/American Institute, New York University

Junyoung Verónica Kim is a visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University. Drawing from critical race and gender studies, queer studies, and decolonial studies, her research focuses on migration, critical militarism, settler colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism across East Asia and the hemispheric Americas. She has published articles on Korean immigration in Argentina, the Global South project, Transpacific Studies, Asian-Latin American literature, and Latin American involvement during the Korean War. Dr. Kim is on the editorial board for the book series “Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia” for Palgrave Macmillian, and “Between Asias and Americas” for University of Pittsburgh Press, and serves on the executive committees of numerous scholarly organizations. Additionally, she is an associate member of the Korea Policy Institute. She is also a core member of the “Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective,” a public education initiative, which provides resources and tools --including a public syllabus-- with the goal of decolonizing and demilitarizing the Korean peninsula. Exploring literary, visual, and cinematic texts across Asia-Latin America, her book in progress–*Cacophonous Intimacies: Reorienting Diaspora and Race in Asia-Latin America*– centers Asian diaspora(s) in Latin America and reveals the intimacies between seemingly disparate histories of multiple imperialisms (Japanese, Spanish and U.S.), hemispheric American settler colonialism, and postcolonial nation building in both East Asia and Latin America. Currently, she has also started working on a new project tentatively titled *Nuclear Diaspora: Asian-Latin American Genealogies, the Black Pacific, and the Korean War*, which examines the intersections, relations, and slippages between Indigenous dispossession, anti-Blackness, and hemispheric American racial formation of “the Asian” during the unending Korean War. Additionally, she is co-editing a special volume of *positions: asia critique* with Dr. Sung Eun Kim on "The Transpacific Korean War."

Discussant: **Spencer Lee-Lenfield**, Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Literature, Harvard University

Chair: **Sung Eun Kim**, 2024–25 SBS Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow in the Social Sciences, Korea Institute, Harvard University

**Abstract:**  
By examining *Black Flower* (*Kŏmŭn kkot*) —renown South Korean writer Kim Young-ha’s historical novel that narrates the tumultuous journey of 1,033 Koreans who migrated to Mexico in 1905 as indentured laborers— this talk explores the transpacific entanglements of Korean colonial modernity, Japanese imperialism, hemispheric American settler colonialism and racial capitalism, as well as Mexican and Guatemalan modern national projects. Taking seriously Asian and Indigenous intimacies that Kim’s novel brings forth only to dismiss as unproductive and failed encounters, this presentation explores the multiple scales of relation through what the author calls cacophonous intimacies: Asian and Indigenous intimacies interrupt, merge, and intersect with transpacific infrastructures of colonial dispossession, accumulated histories of empire (Spanish, Japanese, US), and technologies of racialized gendering. Moreover, this talk contends that Korean-Mayan intimacies exist as spectral presences that signal traces disavowed in the progressive narratives that celebrate modern nationhood exemplified by the triumphant discourse on the Mexican Revolution or on the current South Korean sub-empire, thereby exposing colonialism and modernity as co-constitutive structures of domination.

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To attend this event online, please register [here](https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwrf-itrDssGddj930bmz9gPRmOTxF3ulsu).

*Generously supported by the SBS Foundation Research Fund at the Korea Institute, Harvard University*



 

 



 

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