Sujin Eom receives prize from the Korean Literature Association

Selection committee chair Professor Yoon Sun Yang (Boston University) said about the award:

"Professor Sujin Eom's 'Fugitive Archives: Architecture, Police Photography, and Decolonial Futures,' which appears in Critical Asian Studies in 2024, makes a fascinating case for renewing our understanding of the diasporic space of Incheon Chinatown and, by extension, Sino-Korean relationships in colonial Korea and beyond. Incheon Chinatown appears in modern Korean literature, contemporary popular media, and scholarly works in various ways, but this paper stands out because Professor Eom highlights the Japanese colonial police's photographs of anti-Japanese activists in Incheon Chinatown as a rich transnational archive. By doing so, she excavates a forgotten part of history in which some Chinese migrants attempted to forge cross-racial, anti-imperialist alliances with Koreans under Japanese colonial rule. In this well-researched and clearly written article, Professor Eom invites us to critique Japanese imperialism from a decolonizing, anti-racist perspective rather than a conventional, ethno-nationalist one. The KLA Paper Prize committee selected this paper as this year's winner for its originality, richness, and bold and inspiring intervention into the existing scholarly paradigm."