Post-imperial spaces and alternative imaginaries of the human and nonhuman in Bong Joon Ho’s transnational films

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores conceptions of cinematic and postcolonial-Anthropocene space in South Korean film director Bong Joon Ho’s transnational films: Snowpiercer (2013), Okja (2017) and The Host (2006). By focusing on Bong’s powerful use of space in science fiction films that articulate the question of the human and nonhuman other, I argue that spatial production has presupposed a self-image of ‘Man’ from the imperialist institution of geography to Anthropocene geology. Bong’s employment of abstract landscapes in cinematic space – the snowy landscape in Snowpiercer, the idyllic Korean mountains in Okja and the Han River running through Seoul in The Host – reflects how post-imperial space extends and transforms the construction of colonial space in the neoliberal age. The question of dwelling and co-dwelling then arises in the alternative imaginaries of multispecies existence in the era of the postcolonial-Anthropocene. Bong’s planetary landscapes thus challenge the framing of environmental problems in any single way and refuse to posit a single kind of humanity. This article urges one to rethink the question of ‘we’ and the meaning of dwelling within the Anthropocene/Anthropocentrism by synthesizing postcolonial and transnational perspectives on space.