Japan
Korea

Re-authenticating Race: Rha Saejin and the Recycling of Colonial Physical Anthropology in Post-Colonial Korea

Date
Thu October 27th 2016, 4:30 - 6:00pm
Event Sponsor
History Department, Center for East Asian Studies
Location
Lathrop Library, Room 224, 518 Memorial Way
Re-authenticating Race: Rha Saejin and the Recycling of Colonial Physical Anthropology in Post-Colonial Korea

Speaker: Hoi-eun Kim

Your RSVP is appreciated: RSVP form

What are the roles of colonial physical anthropology in post-colonial societies? Does it simply disappear from the public scene, losing its academic and political utility? Or does it have a renewed life, serving another master in the name of science? The analysis of the post-colonial intellectual trajectories of Rha Saejin, South Korea’s foremost anatomist and physical anthropologist, points to an unsavory continuity. In this talk, Hoi-eun Kim analyzes the ways in which Rha, who had received his professional training during the colonial era, retooled and recycled colonial racial essentialization in support of the post-colonial discourse of ethnic uniformity of the Koreans. Recognizing this continuity of physical anthropology through the colonial and post-colonial periods is to discover the long-term legacy of knowledge that originated from German physician-anthropologists in Meiji Japan, was mediated and relayed by Japanese progenies in Imperial Japan, and found its unexpected utility in post-colonial Korea.

Contact Phone Number