Looking at Foreign Sky, desperately seeking post- Asia: Soni Kum, Nagisa Oshima, Ri Chin’u

Abstract

Abstract The article considers the role of citation and translation in two video works (Foreign Sky, 2005, and Beast of Me, 2005) by Soni Kum, producer and narrator who identifies herself as a member of the ‘North Korean community in Japan’. Both works cite words and images from Oshima Nagisa’s celebrated Death By Hanging (1968), a film protesting the Japanese state’s use of capital punishment in the execution of the zainichi youth, Ri Chin’u, in 1963. Through these interweavings, Kum suggests new perspectives on the role of gender politics in Oshima’s film, while more broadly foregrounding how manipulation of the gendered body produces the affect of cultural nationalism as a heteronormative ideology. While contending that Asia has yet to accede to a post – Cold War temporality, Kum’s work nevertheless searches for modes of transnational solidarity that might characterize something like ‘post- Asia’.