Speaker: Sandra So Hee Chi Kim, Assistant Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies, Stony Brook University

Title: The Ante-Colonial: A Grassroots Discourse of Korean Diasporic Trans-indigenous Relationality

Abstract: This presentation explores a Korean diasporic social media discourse that reimagines indigeneity as a relational framework for anti-imperial critique, transnational solidarity, and decolonial worldmaking. Through close readings of posts by Korean American community organizations, collectives, cultural workers, and movement practitioners, it traces how grassroots creators situate U.S. militarism on the Korean peninsula within interconnected histories of settler colonialism, global capitalism, and indigenous dispossession. Kim develops the concept of the ante-colonial, a trans-indigenous analytic oriented toward precolonial epistemologies and anticolonial futures that denaturalizes the nation-state, foregrounds indigenous relationality, and enables a planetary critique of empire rooted in care, kinship, collective liberation, and decolonial possibility.

Speaker's bio: Sandra So Hee Chi Kim is an Assistant Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University. A transnational cultural studies scholar of Asian American studies, critical Korean studies, and the study of modern empire, her work appears and is forthcoming in Positions: Asia Critique, Korean Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, among other journals. Dr. Kim is also the founder and chair of the grassroots community organization, Asian American Justice + Innovation Lab.