empire

New publication: “Shifting Geographies of Proximity” in Ethnographies of U.S. Empire

“Politically and theologically conservative Korean Protestantism — which constitutes the dominant mainstream and political leadership of Korean Christianity, and is especially prominent among immigrant Korean Americans in the United States — is inextricable from its Cold War collusion with religious and geopolitical-economic reaches of the American empire. This discussion of history — not as a bygone past but as an enduring present — gestures toward my contention that Korean evangelicals are producing Islamophobia as a geopolitical-religious and world orientation project. By aligning Korea with the “Free World” even as Korea reaches out to the developing world, world evangelical missions not only consolidate and reinforce existing affinities and alliances, but also engage in an ongoing calibration of distance and proximity in relation to the empire.”… more

[CFP] Korea with Empire, UPenn

This conference at UPenn “hopes to investigate the various ways Korean polities and Korean actors engaged with ’empire,’ broadly conceived as conceptual, institutional, and social structures justified by claims to universal normativity: whether they be represented by Confucian dynasties and international organizations, or enforced through Cold War orthodoxies.” The organizers are interested in “how Korean actors resisted, contested, but especially, appropriated “empire” for their own ends.”… more