The Sensational Proletarian: Affect and Leftist Cultures in Colonial Korea

Modern East Asian Literature Research Cluster presents

Emerging Research on Modern East Asian Literature

Speaker: Kimberly Chung

Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Korean Literary and Cultural Studies | McGill University

Moderator: Su Yun Kim

Associate Professor in Korean Studies | The University of Hong Kong

DATE: 30 JAN 2026 (FRI) 10:00–11:30 am (HKT)

VENUE: ON ZOOM

REGISTRATION:

https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=104269

Visceral sensations, exaggerated affects, and suffering subjects characterized leftist Korean cultural production in the 1920s and 1930s. In popular fiction, print cartoons, reportage, cultural commentary, and other emergent forms of mass culture, scenes detailing the spectacular bodily harms endured by migrant workers, tenant farmers, factory workers, men, women, and children proliferated. This talk focuses on these textual and visual representations to tell the story of how the new affects and everyday experiences introduced by imperial capitalism and colonial modernity were mediated through the surface of the lower-class body. This book traces the emergence of the “sensational proletarian” as a central semantic figure of colonial Korean print culture and reads its varied manifestations as emblematic of Korean cultural producers’ efforts to use the sensations of the body to interpret and articulate the new political ideology and imaginary of Marxism.

Kimberly Chung is Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Korean Literary and Cultural Studies at McGill University. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from University of California, San Diego. Before arriving at McGill, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hongik University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Korea Institute of Harvard University. She has published research on modern and contemporary Korean literature, visual culture, and art in scholarly journals like “Journal of Korean Studies” and “Acta Koreana” and was a special guest editor for the issue “Sensibility and Landscape in Korean Literature and Film” for “Acta Koreana” (Vol. 17 no.1, 2014). She is a co-editor of an anthology on Korean contemporary art titled “Korean Art From 1953: Collision, Innovation and Interaction” (Phaidon Press, 2020). Her book “The Sensational Proletarian: Leftist Cultures in Colonial Korea” was recently published in July by Stanford University Press.

The series is coordinated by Prof. Su Yun Kim (suyunkim@hku.hk), Prof. Pei-yin Lin (pylin@hku.hk), and Prof. Alvin Wong (akhwong@hku.hk), and is supported by the School of Chinese, School of Humanities, and School of Modern Languages and Cultures. For further details, visit www.meal.hku.hk.