"Taxi Driver" and Representation of Victims in Popular Culture

Department: Center for Critical Korean Studies

Date and Time: May 18, 2018 | 2:00 PM-3:00 PM

Event Location: HIB 110

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Starting with some critiques on the representation of victims in a box office hit Korean film, (Jang Hoon, 2017), this lecture will discuss the ways in which “innocent” victims are trapped in stereotypes of commercial films. They remain passive and ignorant, deprived of any ability to express political awareness or argument, especially when the film deals with collective trauma. However, the discussion does not purport to re-orient victims in a “proper”position in representation, or to equip them with certain voices with effectivity. Examples of “comfort women” and other victims of sexual assault, as well as the survivors of Holocaust, will prove that we need construct an exit strategy from this deadlock.  This lecture will introduce Shoshanna Felman's critique of Hannah Arendt to project this issue of victim representation onto a slightly different realm, that is, a courtroom, which will help us settle the relevant controversy over who and where to establish “justice,”and contemplate how we can prevent victim blaming and various forms of secondary violence. We should understand Felman’s “victims’court”figuratively, and find it elsewhere other than the real courtroom. In fact, popular narratives now provide spaces and devices where victims make themselves visible in their own way, just as literature and traditional art have done for the past few centuries vis-a-vis law and politics. In short, this study of contemporary films about political turmoil shows that popular culture can complement various means of justice implementation, in which helpless victims can affect others by being seen and heard just the way they are.

Soo-Young Nam is associate professor at the department of Cinema Studies (within the division of Film, TV and Multimedia) of the Korea National University of Arts in Seoul, Korea.  Since the completion of Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at New York University in 2006, she has published various articles in the field of cultural studies, critical theories, and media studies. She won the Outstanding Academic Book award by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of Korea in 2010 with Historical Memories in the Time of Image: Documentary, Repetition for Subversion, and received Wooho Award in Humanities in 2017