Dartmouth Events

Professor Jung Joon Lee, Theory and History of Art and Design at the Rhode Island School of Design

Exploring what it means to practice photography in the normalized conditions of militarism, Professor Jung Joon Lee’s book Shooting for Change: Korean Photography after the War (Duke University Press, 2024) treats the transnational militarism of Korea as a lens through which we may probe the officially and culturally sanctioned readings of images when returning to them at different times. In this lecture, Lee considers the visualization of the spaces of transnational militarism—the U.S. military camptowns in South Korea—that are, for most Koreans, imagined spaces beyond the sovereignty of South Korea in the name of peacekeeping. Lee examines the gendered and racialized representations of Korean camptowns and readings of these through the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific and offers an analysis of the Black worldmaking taking place vis-à-vis transpacific experiences in the face of de facto segregation and anti-Black racism both at home and in Korean camptowns—as presented in Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel, Home, and Kang Yong Suk’s 1982 photography series, From Dongducheon.