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Date(s)： 2026/10/28
Time： 15:00~17:00
Venue： Archives 3rd Conference Hall
Host： Prof. Po-hsi Chen（Assistant research fellow, IMH, AS）
Speaker：Prof. Baik Jiwoon（首爾大學統一和平研究院副教授）
Organizer： IMH
Abstract, This lecture reconstructs the largely forgotten role of Third World discourse in the genealogy of South Korean critical thought and traces its transformation into East Asia discourse after the Cold War. Although South Korea shared with many decolonizing societies the experiences of colonial rule, national liberation, and war, its incorporation into the U.S.-led anticommunist order largely excluded it from political projects such as Bandung and the Non-Aligned Movement. This contradiction produced an ambivalent but productive engagement with the Third World, particularly among critical intellectuals during the authoritarian decades of the 1970s and 1980s. The lecture then examines how, amid democratization, industrialization, and China’s rise in the 1990s, East Asia gradually replaced the Third World as a central framework of critical thought. Focusing on the Changbi (創批) intellectual group, it argues that this shift involved both rupture and continuity: East Asia inherited the Third Worldist search for alternatives to Western capitalist modernity and new forms of solidarity. Recovering this genealogy offers a way to reconsider East Asian critical thought in relation to contemporary inequality, ecological crisis, and postcolonial justice.