DescriptionThis dissertation investigates the cultural history of mobility as portrayed in post-World War II literature and philosophy across the Pacific, with a focus on modern Korea. Shaped by and servicing militarization and economic dispossession in the Pacific, mobility categorizes people according to their abilities into distant populations for use and disuse. This dissertation argues that the deployment of a speculative genre of writing in the Pacific offers a tool for understanding mobility’s effects and possibilities. A more collective understanding of mobility, one less centered on individual abilities, emerges from such a focus, to propose decolonial futures against militarization’s rigid categorizations of social life and ability in the Pacific.
The main contribution of this dissertation is decolonial understandings of mobility to the fields of Korean studies, disability studies, and decolonial thought. While mobility has often been understood in the vein of migration and globalization, such an approach tends to naturalize mobility and immobility resulting from the political and material processes of militarization and settler colonialism. This dissertation attends to the understandings of mobility as espoused in conditions of immobilization, which reveals how visions of decolonization intersect from sites across the Pacific for both migrant and native populations to overcome the legacies of militarization and settler colonialism without reproducing the stigma of immobility.
Chapter One lays the foundations for a decolonial theory of mobility and offers a theoretical engagement with the critiques of fascism and the philosophy of movement offered by the thinker Takeuchi Yoshimi, in conversation with the works of Frantz Fanon, Ernst Bloch, and Aimé Césaire. Chapter Two examines the archipelagic alliance against colonial fascism in the Pacific in the South Korean author Ch’oe In-Hun’s novel The Typhoon (T’aep’ung, 1973) which tells a speculative history of the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung and Korea’s reunification. Chapter Three probes the political alliance across (dis)ability, race, and nationality in Anishinaabe thinker Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003) and Korean American poet Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Revolution: A Poem (2007). Chapter Four analyzes physical immobility and the absence of affect associated with migrant and indigenous laboring bodies in polluted environments in the South Korean fictions: Kang Yŏngsuk’s Rina (Lina 2011), Kim Sagwa’s City of Terror (T'erŏŭisi 2012), and Yun Goŭn’s Night Travelers (Pamŭiyŏhaengjadŭl 2013).