The Bearable Lightness of Being LiNK: Anti-Aesthetic Banality and Student Humanitarianism Concerning North Korean Refugees

This article considers the student humanitarianism of an undergraduate university chapter of Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) toward a reconsideration of political aesthetics within the anthropology of humanitarian activity. Via what the organization describes as a “modern-day underground railroad,” LiNK aims to assist North Korean refugees within China in transiting to safer havens in third countries, from which they may in turn seek permanent settlement, usually in South Korea. In service to this purpose, it sponsors a network of chapters or “rescue teams” that mostly aim to enroll collegiate or high school youth in the United States and beyond for fundraising as well as parallel goals of advocacy and the building of “awareness.” Focusing on one such group, and drawing on other considerations of the domestic subjects of wide-ranging humanitarian activity, my ethnographic examination explores what I refer to as the “anti-aesthetic aesthetics” of student LiNK, its refusal of the aesthetics of empathy common within other humanitarian practice. Chapter members did not by and large practice the sympathetic magic of much humanitarianism, for instance through the performance of asceticism in homage to the suffering North Korean refugees endure or through the transmission of tokens of care. The overall tone of LiNK student activity was instead quite light, to the point of sometimes being ethnographically jarring. I argue that this affective lightness should not be overlooked or dismissed, for it helped to form an emotional and conceptual armature for student activists’ recognition of North Koreans fleeing the country as “just like” themselves, a recognition present also in the use and reception of LiNK media. Ultimately, this political imagination of similarity between LiNK students and their population of concern suggests a critique of the anthropological critique of humanitarian subjectivities as based on a foundational bifurcation of modes of human being.