Angie Heo (University of Chicago), ‘A Story of “Patriotic Insanity” and Anticolonial Solidarity: Two Korean Assassins Meet the San Francisco Irish in 1908’.

In March 1908, two Korean migrants shot American diplomat Durham W. Stevens along the San Francisco waterfront. Stevens, an outspoken advocate for Japanese colonial rule of Korea, died a couple days later in the hospital from his fatal wounds. One of the assassins, Chang In Hwan, stood trial and faced a murder charge. It was the Irish-American lawyer Nathan Coghlan who came to Chang’s defense by appealing to Arthur Schopenhauer’s idea of “patriotic insanity.” Although Coghlan’s argument was unsuccessful, what the entire drama ended up revealing was the widespread empathy of San Francisco’s Irish community for Koreans fighting for national independence abroad from California and Hawaii to Shanghai and Manchuria.  This lecture revisits this landmark event in Korean-American history and Korean nationalist politics on the eve of Japan’s annexation of the Peninsula. Emboldened by recent moves in anthropologies of diaspora and empire, it examines how different nationalist movements converged and grew in parallel on a global scale across the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

Angie Heo is Associate Professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. After receiving her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley, she taught at Barnard College Columbia University (New York City) and held research fellow positions at Emory University (Atlanta) and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. Her first book, The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt (University of California Press, 2018), examines how Coptic Orthodoxy mediates social relations between Christians and Muslims in Egypt. Her next book turns to the study of Protestantism and anti-communism in the Korean Peninsula.