Im Sun-deuk: Decolonial Women Writers in Literary and Women’s Inter/nationalisms

The Council on East Asian Studies is pleased to present the 6th Seong-Yawng Park GRD '65 and Marguerite Clark Park Memorial Lecture in Korean Studies.

A reception will follow the lecture in the Luce Common Room (2nd Floor).

This paper examines Im Sun-deuk, the first Korean feminist critic and writer, as a pivotal figure illustrating the absence of decolonial women writers in both genealogies of literary internationalism and women’s internationalism. While the significant roles of male writers in Third World internationalism are well documented (e.g., W. E. B. DuBois at the Afro-Asian Writers Congress, Aimé Césaire in Négritude), the crucial contributions of women writers to decolonial worldmaking remain mostly intangible. Their impact is often sidelined in both Third World literary internationalism and the history of women’s internationalism, including the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). This paper aims to contextualize this gap by examining the conditions that shaped this lacuna. By tracing Im’s tenuous archive and secondary sources, this paper explores the potential of literary internationalism as integral to women’s internationalism and vice versa.

Jesook Song is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, affiliated with the Women and Gender Studies Institute and Sexual Diversity Studies. She is a historical and political economic anthropologist. Her first book, South Koreans in the Debt Crisis (Duke University Press, 2009), addresses homelessness and youth unemployment during the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s to early 2000s. Her second book, Living On Their Own (SUNY Press, 2014), explores single households and informal financial markets through the struggles of single women in South Korea. She has also (co)edited New Millennium South Korea (Routledge, 2011), On the Margins of Urban South Korea (University of Toronto Press, 2019), and Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea (University of Michigan Press, 2024).
She has numerous publications in journals including Urban Geography, Antipode, Critique of Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly, Feminist Review, Gender Place & Culture, positions, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Korean Studies, and Journal of Youth Studies.