The Korean Self/American Other

Abstract

Since the Cold War era, the musical theater genre in South Korea has been primarily perceived through an aura of “American-ness,” and thus as a symbol of affluence associated with modernity. This chapter traces the influence of Americanization in the Pacific Rim on the development of Korean musical theater from the 1960s to the 1980s, with a focus on how musical theater as a genre evolved concurrently with Korea’s rapid push toward modernization. Native Koreans gained more direct contact with American popular culture after the Korean War, as the US Eighth Army Corps were stationed in South Korea. Young theater groups began instead to explore new theater aesthetics from abroad, as well as to seek ways to create original Korean theater by cultivating and incorporating traditional Korean culture. Broadway became an impetus for the development of Korean national culture, to the point of functioning as a mode of reconstructing the “Korean self” through an American system.