In 1966, the North Korean government hired Venezuelan poet Ali Lameda to work as a Spanish-language translator. After Lameda criticized the North Korean government in 1967, security officials arrested him. During two separate terms of detainment, Lameda continued to produce poetry. In 1974, following appeals from the international community, Lameda gained his freedom. Drawing from a range of archival and literary sources, this lecture examines history at the scale of an individual, a state, and a human rights organization. It demonstrates how poetic practice as refracted through these scales complicates previous visions of a unified, Third World-led, anti-imperialist future, and how historicizing Lameda’s poetry reveals what human rights claims obscure.

This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP for the event here.

This event is part of Stanford Global Studies’ Oceanic Imaginaries, a multi-year initiative that adopts the world’s oceans as an analytical framework for advancing cross-regional, interdisciplinary research on timely global topics

About the speaker:

Historian Eilin Rafael Perez studies the cultural production that arose out of diplomatic engagement between Korea and the decolonizing world. He is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Global History at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.