Things that are not—but at once hardly unrelated to—my primary work
I will be giving a talk on Soh Jae Pil (서재필[徐載弼], also known as Philip Jaisohn, 1864-1951) and Soh Kwang Pom (서광범[徐光範], 1859-1897) who was Jaisohn’s fourth cousin once removed. Today, the Soh cousins are celebrated as the first and second Korean immigrants who acquired U.S. citizenship through naturalization.
The Korean edition of Rogers M. Smith's That Is Not Who We Are!: Populism and Peoplehood (Yale University Press, 2020), co-translated by Hyemee Kim and yours truly, has been published on May 17th, 2023. Below is our translator’s note:
One thing I like about Tony Judt is his penetrating insight into political evils as well as his unwavering resistance to any sort of lachrymose self-regard. This essay represents Tony Judt at his best. I first translated this essay into Korean in 2008. However, it was only about two months ago (January 2022) that I found the right venue for its publication.
“Though we often wish otherwise, life is fraught with losses and tragedies. Some tragedies develop gradually while others transpire abruptly without any prior notice. Sometimes, we grieve for weeks, months, or even years over our losses. Grieving and mourning often help us to ultimately live on and move on, but many a time, we still feel enduring pains, pains that we can make disappear temporarily only to see their recurrence. SaltSoul, a multidisciplinary choreographic art project, attends to our struggles in the face of these paralyzing losses. This aesthetically elegant and thought-provoking performance has revealed a human beauty amid our unsettling vulnerability and fragility. The most striking patterns of movement include the bodies rolling and piling up on top of each other. The reiteration of this movement intimates the cyclical and repetitious nature of our pains, recovery, and recrudescence. However repetitious, it never seems to be mechanistic. When one performer after another show their complete receptivity by inviting and holding up the body of each other with their wistful yet not too much sentimental dewed eyes, when their gentle caresses invoke a sense of primordial wholeness, they in fact create and indulge in the most human moment. Jungwoong Kim and his terrific collaborators in SaltSoul have shown that our ongoing journey toward coming to terms with and eventually embracing our painful losses can be communal and public, not merely individual and personal.”
Juman Kim
* This endorsement was included in their report to the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.
I was on air with David Oh, a member of the City Council of Philadelphia, in his show In the Know with David Oh, on October 24th, 2017.
My Op-ed piece on Korean Politics appeared in Korea Exposé: "A Eulogy for Another Radical Centrist"
YOU FOR ME FOR YOU is a fantastic and fantastical play written by Mia Chung. I saw the show this past spring and was privileged to have a great time to talk with those remarkable performers and the audience afterwards.
Its witty yet thoughtful magical realism provoked a hearty laugh, brought tears to my eyes, and definitely gave me some foods for thought on human needs, sacrifice, trauma, political power, and our being-in-time (or in *times* as we inhabit in different temporalities at once).
When I taught at the Korea Air Force Academy, I penned a number of columns for Korean newspapers and magazines including two articles posted below.
"진리와 상대주의: 블룸과 로티의 논쟁" [Truth and Relativism: Bloom versus Rorty]
"행복, 그 초월의 지평" [Happiness: Musings on Its Horizon and Beyond]
!["진리와 상대주의: 블룸과 로티의 논쟁" [Truth and Relativism: Bloom versus Rorty]](/s/Screen-Shot-2017-12-19-at-124945-PM.png){kind=link}