Summer Reading: "Superman Now" (초인은 지금) from 김이환

I've been following Kim's work for some time now, and, at some point, will post up my impressions of his novel, "Neighborhood War" (동네 전쟁). But, until then, some short notes on his short story, "Superman Now" (초인은 지금) in the collection "The Superhero Next Door" (2015). What draws me to Kim's work is his use of Seoul as the staging for his stories, and it is not difficult to see why. Besides being a huge, Dickensian metropolis full of dramatic encounters and chance meetings, it is city of sometimes profoundly alienating spaces: row upon row of apartments, faceless office buildings. Accordingly, Kim's Seoul is a place for disturbingly non-human encounters. Seoul citizens are harried by a black-hole like sphere in 절망의 구 (2009), and by monstrous, multi-species aliens in 동네전쟁 (2011). Confronted with the completely enigmatic, Kim's characters circulate rumors and wild theories, but their attempts to understand the city always fall short. In Kim's contribution to this short story collection, the "superman" is likewise enigmatic: seemingly human, but unused to human contact and human physiology. For some reason, the superman only saves people within the boundaries of Seoul--never the suburbs. And he has never talked to anyone--well, perhaps just one person. But he could also be anyone, an everyman with an ordinary appearance. People who have been saved by the superman collect data and post it on an internet "superman cafe," and dubious theories abound. Two of these people--one saved from a subway fire, the other from a terrorist attack--stroll around the plaza around Seoul City Hall while they wait for the results on a popular referendum a "superman law" that will place the superman under the administrative control of the Gangnam police force. But it's doubtful that the superman will obey--if he even understands the politics of Park Geun-hye's Korea in the first place! For Kim, the enigmatic story is another entry in his chronicle of Seoul, where the familiar and the uncanny continuously swap places, and where "superman" means both man and non-man.

Comments

Networked, Not Virtual: ethnography when you can't go there

(from our storymap ) In my capacity as a fellow in our faculty research center, I've been doing a lot of support work for the unexpected shift to learning-at-a-distance. At my uni, very few of us have experience teaching online. The faculty (generally) aren't especially enthusiastic, and there hasn't really been a lot of institutional support. So, I wasn't surprised when most of the questions I was fielding took the form of: "I do X in my class. How can I do X online?" Not surprised because that's the ideological frame distance education has relied upon: an exact homology between offline- and online teaching, with the physical classroom replaced by the discussion board, the lectures by videos. But actual online courses (not our band aid efforts to stitch together something in a few days) are structured very differently than their physical counterparts. The best classes maximize their digital affordances and don’t try to simply "reprodu...

SETI: Signs in space/ Enacting space

[From the SETI project, "A Sign in Space" ( https://asignin.space/ )] “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings,’ Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation In May, the SETI Institute Artist-in-Residence initiated a piece of collaborative performance–the decoding of an “alien” message, transmitted from the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). “A Sign in Space” is a simulation that enlists ordinary people in the work of “decoding” an alien message–one that you can download yourself. Along the way, SETI has hosted a series of workshops (including one from anthropologist Willi Lempert ) designed to help participants through the decoding process–including hints on avoiding ethnocentric (and anthropocentric) assumptions about what this communication could be and what the intentions of extraterrestrial intelligence might entail. I am a very enthusiastic SETI advocate, but I wonder if “decoding” is re...

AAA Abstract Proposal: Summerland, Otherwise and and the Ghosts of Alternative Futures: the Limits of Multimodality in Anthropology and Spiritualism

As anthropologists work with collaborators in evoking alternatives to capitalist fascisms, they increasingly engage multimodal registers; games, design, graphic novels and soundscapes join film and text in innovative work that seeks to ground worlding in sensorial engagement and haptic experience. Here, the multimodal can support the emancipatory politics of communities where anthropologists work. But what of the politics of multimodal? Is there anything inherently emancipatory in the engagement with diverse platforms? In order to problematize the multimodal, this paper explores another moment in multimodal evocations of alternative futures–Spiritualism in the late 19th century. While “spirit rapping” may have been the first volley in the explosion of Spiritualist practice, the movement soon incorporated writing, drawing, sounds, photographs and multiple objects into its evocations of a “Beautiful Beyond” that represented not only the afterlife, but the utopian...

All Tomorrow's Cultures

Search This Blog