Nam Center Colloquium Series | You are What You Eat: The Practice of Obtaining and Maintaining Nationalist Identity

Co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science and Political Scientists of Color (PSOC).

What does it mean to treat nationalism as if it were a commodity that can be consumed and (re-)produced on the marketplace? This presentation starts with a short yet instructive tale of Monosodium Glutamate or MSG: despite the discovery of the substance by a Japanese chemist in 1908, it was actually the commodification of Chinese nationalism through MSG by patriotic capitalists in China that, to this day, makes the average consumer associate the flavor enhancer with China rather than Japan. This sets the stage for not only introducing the idea of consuming (and producing) identity, but also what it means to conceive of nationalism as a practice or a sustained process rather than a singular emotion or feeling. By introducing some of the commodification activities surrounding the territorial disputes among countries in Northeast Asia—both in terms of consumables and non-consumables—this presentation will showcase the close connection between politics and economics, and also challenge some of the traditional assumptions behind nationalism.

Jiun Bang is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Nam Center for Korean Studies at the University of Michigan. Her doctoral project examined the ‘business of nationalism’ and explained how the process of commodification undertaken by various actors within the nation-state influences bilateral inter-state tensions. From 2008 to 2010, she was an associate at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses (KIDA), a government-affiliated research institute in Seoul. During that time, she was the assistant editor of the Korean Journal of Defense Analysis. She received her PhD from the University of Southern California in 2016, an MA in Security Studies from Georgetown University, and a BA in International Relations from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, her hometown.