Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:59:08am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Echoes of Colonialism in Modern Korean Music Session Chair: Jeong-In Lee | |
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Kisaeng Entertainment Labor and the Limit to Marxist Imaginations in Colonial Korea University of Pennsylvania With the dismantling of the Korean court under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), Korea's courtesans known as kisaeng were stripped of state patronage and forcibly reconstituted as wage-earning musical entertainers in a rapidly industrializing colonial economy. While many kisaeng leveraged their new labor regime by waging strikes and rearticulating themselves from a hereditary class to a revolutionary proletariat, colonial intellectuals held that both the labor and the music of kisaeng were incompatible with the imperatives of national liberation and social revolution. This paper asks why, even as kisaeng increasingly occupied the position of waged cultural laborers, the artist-intellectual left excluded their labor and popular musical forms from their vision of proletarian culture. Marxist and other socialist discourses of the time cast the commodified musical entertainment labor of the kisaeng as a sinister symptom of life’s mechanization under colonial capitalism, and the popular lament songs performed by kisaeng as especially antithetical to the project of historical progress as envisioned by the proletarian arts movement, the cultural arm of colonial Marxists. I suggest that the history of the kisaeng and their cultural labor exposes a critical limit to the humanist imaginations of Marxists in colonial Korea. This history contributes to Marxist music studies and to scholarship on gendered cultural labor under capitalism. | |