Crystal Baik, Associate Professor, Gender & Sexuality Studies, University of California, Riverside

In this talk, Professor Crystal Mun-hye Baik offers a glimpse into her second book project, Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun: An Elegy. An intimate cultural history of war, illness, and estrangement framed through her family history, Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun consists of different genres of speculative writing, spanning from narrative prose and the family photo album to the epistolary and Korean mourning rituals. Drawing on diasporic grief as a felt form of writing, Professor Baik situates the lives of her parents within the arcs of Japanese colonial occupation, the Korean War, division, and migration. In doing so, she reckons with diasporic genealogies of precarity, gender and class violence, and colonial complicity, while also offering a reparative approach to remembering through the gifts of listening, dwelling, and writing.

Co-sponsored by EAS, the Department of Anthropology, and the Program in International Studies