Dr. Nancy Abelmann will be giving a talk on Friday, October 26, at the University of Pittsburgh titled "The Melodrama of Mobility, Continued: South Korea's Fragile Cosmopolitans". The summary of her talk, from the Asian Studies Center:
In this talk I think about the changing aesthetics of desire and social mobility. I consider the porous boundary between the radically normative and potentially transgressive in South Korea today. I tune into the adult lives of the now adult children of women featured in my earlier work on South Korea’s developmentalist mothers; as well as memoirs written by early study abroad mothers. I also take up several cultural texts, including blockbuster novel, Please Take Care of My Mother; and the 2004 film, My Mother the Mermaid.That's rather vague, though you can read some of her previous work on her webpage. I would be interested to read the source materials, the memoirs written by early study abroad mothers, as well as finding some treatment of how the fathers---left behind to work in Korea while their families go abroad, and often neglected in scholarship---cope with the demands this quest for social mobility places on them.
The title of the talk is in reference to her 2003 book The Melodrama of Mobility, and you can learn more about it at the library or through this 2004 review from Anthropology Quarterly (.pdf).
The talk will be held at Posvar Hall (map) from 4:00 to 5:30.