On December 5, 2024, the K-Future Team held its final Theory Atelier of the year, centered on “Civil War and Hygiene: Horizons for a Critique of Colonial Capitalism,” a lecture by Hang Kim, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Yonsei University. Taking his book Civil War and Hygiene (2024), published in September, as its point of departure, the lecture revisited the trajectory of Kim’s work in relation to the questions of Korean Studies.

Kim read colonial capitalism through the ways it has differentiated persons and worlds, approaching this process through the terms “civil war” and “hygiene.” “Civil war” here names not a war against an equal enemy, but a political form that identifies and hunts out enemies in the name of a universal subject; “hygiene” appears as the desire to purify the boundaries of the “good citizen” or “we.” The Jeju Yemeni refugee case and responses to Queer Parade were discussed as instances in which this sense of exclusion surfaced in Korean society. The lecture ultimately asked how to bring back the “body” and “genealogy” erased in the name of the “transparent human” by colonial capitalism.