I have also wanted to show here that childhood events,
early and late, are already irreducibly intellectual,
and that those events are already adventures.
(Cavell, Little Did I Know, p. 461)
Seeing Like a Child is an extraordinary book on ordinary life. It resonates with the voice of a child claiming her own relevance in the midst of unspeakable …
The radical innovations in theory and method that Clara Han accomplishes in her book, Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Han 2021), are unobtrusive and her descriptions are both gripping and to use a child’s word, “scary”. Yet classical questions on kinship, home, war, violence, are nestled into the text as a backstory rather than dramatized or …
In October 2019 I had the chance to discuss Clara’s work at a wonderful seminar in Baltimore at a time when it was possible to give a speech in front of people, to meet together, shake hands, drink and eat together, and even give a strong hug to express our enthusiasm. The book, Seeing Like a Child was not yet …
The Korean War (1950–1953) was not a single war but rather a combination of several different kinds of war. Above all, it was a civil war fought between two mutually negating postcolonial political forces, each of which, through the negation, aspired to build a common, singular, and united modern nation-state. It was part of a global conflict waged between two …
In “From Gwangju to Brixton: The Impossible Translation of Han Kang’s Human Acts,” Yumi Pak (2020) situates reading and writing in the space and time in which we are. In the essay, Pak explains how her initial attempt at analyzing Han’s Human Acts was thwarted precisely because the form of writing in which she is most familiar with …
Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2021) describes war’s dispersal into everyday life, intimacy and the domestic. Departing from genres of testimony, as well as auto-ethnography, Han seeks to write from a child’s perspective, both as the daughter of parents displaced by the war and who migrate to the United States, as well …