Hyungji Park, "From the Nile to the Han: Nineteenth-Century Korea, Egypt, and the Limits of Orientalism"
Tuesday, APRIL 28｜12-1 PM
Coble 306 and on Zoom: https://go.cgs.illinois.edu/HyungjiPark_Lecture_4_28
Description: What happens when an American diplomat arrives in Korea expecting the "Orient" — and doesn't find it? Charles Chaillé-Long, a veteran of the American Civil War, the Egyptian Army and explorer of the Nile, came to Seoul in the late nineteenth century with a mental map of the "Oriental" shaped by his experience in Egypt. Korea didn't fit. This talk traces how Chaillé-Long's comparisons between Egypt and Korea expose the limits of Orientalism as a framework for understanding East Asia, and what those limits mean for how we think about early Korean-American diplomatic engagements.
Bio: Hyungji Park is Professor of English Literature at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea. Her research focuses on Victorian literature, postcolonial studies, and nineteenth-century contact between Britain and Korea. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for Global Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is developing a project on visual culture in nineteenth-century British-Korean relations.