Oral history is a process of making history in dialogue…it is cocreative, co-embodied, specially framed, contextually and intersubjectively contingent, sensuous, vital, artful in its achievement of narrative form, meaning, and ethics, and insistent on doing through saying: on investing the present and future with the past, re-making history with previously excluded subjectivities, and challenging the conventional frameworks of historical knowledge with other ways of knowing.
—Della Pollock, Remembering: Oral History Performance
History is Alive:
The history of modern Korea is dynamic, tumultuous, challenging, and living. Like all history, the events reviewed in the course “HI244: Brothers at War—Modern Korean History, 1945-Present” are not merely academic extractions, but rather real experiences felt, shaped, and imbued with meaning by people—many of whom are still with us. The story of the two Koreas, from division to war to development and beyond, is made up of the stories of those who lived it. And the historical meanings that we can draw from these events is built on the basis of what stories are told, whose stories are heard, and how well we listen.
Memory is History:
Over the course of the semester, students enrolled in “Brothers at War” produce an original oral history project that contributes to the documentation and historicization of modern Korea and its diasporas. Oral history refers to both the process of collecting and recording first-hand recollections of the past and to the researched narrative produced from that process. It is a historical methodology that demands mutual respect between students as interviewers and their subjects as narrators, as well as a practice that calls all members of the class to radical empathy by engaging directly with history as lived experience (and lived experience as history). Together, we embark on and support one another through a semester-long process of preparation, conversation, research, and writing to build an archive of digital resources at Colby College for future generations of students, scholars, and searchers or all stripes.
SPRING 2023: Seoul Food
The Spring 2023 iteration of this project is sponsored by the Colby Center for the Arts and Humanities as part of the 2022-2023 theme, “Food for Thought.” As such, the oral histories collected by students enrolled in this semester focused on the role of food in the experiences that make up modern Korean history. The history of modern Korean food offers us a uniquely concrete lens through which to better understand the political polarization of modern Korean identity. Food in Korea can and does express a range of historical hopes and fears that students have had the opportunity to explore in conversations that touched on themes like authenticity and community, survival and continuity, development and prosperity, globalization and hybridity, etc. In collaboration with their oral history narrators, Colby students of Korean history asked: What can our hungers reveal about our histories?
FALL 2023: Perilous Play
The Fall 2023 iteration of this project is sponsored by the Colby Center for the Arts and Humanities as part of its 2023-2025 theme, “Play!” As such, the oral histories collected by students enrolled in this semester focused on the role of play in the experiences that make up modern Korean history. Modes of play have long offered ways to mediate and navigate tensions on the Korean peninsula, in Korean society, and laced through Korean history. Whether through mass military “games” that serve as proxy battles for the unended Korean War, the pursuit of sexual pleasure in “entertainment” districts, the deployment of humor to naturalize derisive constructions of the rival “other,” or the gamification of socioeconomic competition in media, play on the one hand reinforces the relationships that have made modern Korea, while on the other offers the possibility of subverting dynamics that skew the game in favor of on player or another. In this way, play is a perilous agent in the fraught “game” between North and South Korea, their global allies and enemies, and Korean peoples in and beyond the peninsula.