EARLY CAREER PUBLISHING WORKSHOP
Tina Chen
(Penn State)
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
“Reorienting Global Asias: Asia-Latin America and Architectures of War“
On April 30th, 1977, 14 mothers sent a letter asking the military dictator Jorge Rafael Videla for the whereabouts of their disappeared children and began to gather in silent protest in the Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires. Known as the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, this spurred a mass movement that continues today. Around the same time, on May 18th, 1980, citizens of Gwangju, South Korea, launched a mass resistance movement against the dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan. The South Korean military retaliated in full force resulting in the massacre and disappearance of thousands of Gwangju citizens. The connections and intimacies between the overlapping histories of these two cities demonstrate the ways in which Global South countries were violently conscripted into dirty wars against communism. Despite the explicit linkages, why are the histories of these two places (cities and nations) studied separately—divided and separated by discrete disciplinary boundaries? How does insurgent memory both disrupt dominant historical national narratives and yoke together these two geographies/histories/futurities? Moreover, how does the present absence of the missing in Gwangju and the desaparecidos (disappeared) in Buenos Aires haunt the urban geographies that are shaped through the ordinary violence of gentrification and urban development? Engaging in a reading of Im Heung-soon’s video installation and documentary Good Light, Good Air (2018, 2020), this keynote explores the multiple vectors and scales of Global Asias. By adopting Eyal Weizman’s conceptualization of forensic architecture, I contend that the ruins, holes, and missing parts of both the material (bodies, architectures, urban geographies) and the epistemic (archives, knowledge production, disciplinary formation) demonstrate what cannot be visiblized or seen otherwise. In situating the Gwangju Uprising and the Argentine dirty war as a part and parcel of the cartography of Global Asias that reframes diaspora as analytic, I propose that paying attention to Asian-Latin American intimacies reorients our understanding and practice of Global Asias toward fabulating a decolonial and demilitarized world.
