Late Colonial Korea Research Articles

일제 말기 식민지 조선의 공간적 표상 : 『조광』의 국내 기행문 분석을 중심으로

일제 말기 식민지 조선의 공간적 표상 : 『조광』의 국내 기행문 분석을 중심으로

Staging Images of Everyday Life in Late Colonial Korea: Colonial Visuality and the Proliferation of Amateur Photography

ABSTRACT At the height of World War II, the Government General of Korea exerted considerable effort to propagandise and mobilise the colonial population. Films, fictional works, theatrical productions, posters and exhibits exhorted colonised Koreans to support the war effort and sacrifice themselves for the Japanese empire. At the same time, a considerable number of images from the period provided views of a more mundane everyday life, filled with smiling children going to school and farmers living an idyllic communal life. Late colonial publications offer a fascinating visual archive of Korea, and behind the plethora of everyday images was the spread of amateur photography. The Japanese colonial state in Korea systematically and purposefully used amateur photographs to visually “stage” everyday life, transforming the images into symbolic representations that legitimated colonisation. In terms of visual politics and the aims of this special issue, the study of the visual practices of the colonial period underscores how their influence has persisted long after liberation in 1945 and continues to affect representations of Korean society, culture and nationhood even today.

Colonial Mobility and the Biopolitics of the Colonial Non-Place

By approaching Namcheon Kim’s short story “On the Road” (1939) from the new mobilities paradigm, this paper explores the paradoxical relationship between the colonial government and the postcolonial politics in late colonial Korea. In this short story, the Korean territories in the late 1930s are represented as colonial “non-places,” in which is exercised imperialistic biopower through colonial mobility. The Korean people residing in the non-places are characterized as bare lives on-the-move who only seek to survive, yielding their political rights to the imperialistic biopower. Thereby, this short story demonstrates the reorganization of the colonial territory as a colonial non-place and the transformation of the Korean population into colonial subjects in order to stabilize the Japanese colonial regime. However, considering thatthe bare lives on-the-move are divested of any identity, relations, and history, the colonial nonplace might be construed to be disclosing the vulnerability of the Japanese colonial regime and, thus, the possibility of postcolonial politics.

Wartime Forestry and the “Low Temperature Lifestyle” in Late Colonial Korea, 1937–1945

This article examines the emergence in colonial Korea of a command economy for forestry products following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). It does so, first, by tracing the policy mechanisms through which the colonial state commandeered forest products, especially timber, firewood, and charcoal. Second, through an analysis of the wartime promotion of a “low temperature lifestyle,” it offers a thumbnail sketch of the lived experiences and corporeal consequences of state-led efforts to rationalize fuel consumption. Considered together, these lines of analysis offer insight into not only the ecological implications of war on the Korean landscape, but also the bodily privations that defined everyday life under total war—what might be called the “slow violence” of caloric control.

Modern Art in Late Colonial Korea: A Research Experiment

Modern Art in Late Colonial Korea: A Research Experiment

Modernisms after Modernism: the New Modernist Studies with Potential and Challenges

모더니즘 담론에서 일반적인 연구 대상은 20세기 초반에 유럽과 미국에서 나타난 실험적 문화 예술 운동이다. 그러나 현대화로 인한 변화를 모더니즘의 주요 원인으로 보는 만큼, 현대화가 일찍 진행된 서구 국가들과 달리 시기적으로 뒤늦게 등장한 국가들의 모더니즘은 연구에서 제외되거나 타자의 형태로 작품 속에 존재하였다. 이후 일부 모더니즘 작품에 나타나는 제국주의에 대한 연구가 활발해지고 서구 이외의 국가들의 현대화가 진행되는 가운데 20세기 후반부터 세계화로 인한 범세계적 연구가 가능해지면서 새로운 모더니티와 모더니즘 연구의 판이 짜지는 계기가 마련됐다. 새로운 모더니즘의 경향을 통합적으로 살펴 보는 데는 여러 난제가 있으나, 1999년에 설립된 ‘모더니즘연구 학회’가 이러한 방향을 설정하는 기준을 구축하는 노력을 하고 있는 중이다. 이 학회는 1994년 Modernism/Modernity라는 학술지 창간에 이어서 설립된 학술단체로, 시들해져 가던 모더니즘 연구를 부활시킨 계기를 마련했다. 서구 중심을 탈피한 모더니즘 연구는 아직 상대적으로 부족하지만, 이 학회에서 주요 행사 중 하나인 모더니 즘연구 학회 학술상의 최근 수상작은 주로 새로운 관념의 모더니즘들과 관련된 저서들이 강세를 이루었다. 2015년 수상작은 자넷 풀(Janet Poole)의 『미래가 사라진 때』로, 한국의 모더니즘에 관한 연구서이다. 외국 작가에 의한 일본 식민지 상황의 한국 모더니즘 작가 연구가 시사하는 바는, 이러한 새로운 모더니즘 연구가 비단 기존 모더니즘 연구의 지형도를 바꿀 뿐 아니라 한국 문학 연구의 판을 새로이 짜기도 한다는 사실이다. 새로운 모더니즘 연구로 인한 변화가 긍정적인지의 여부, 그리고 새로운 모더니즘이 공통된 특징을 명시 가능한 새로운 문예사조로서 기능하는지의 여부는 조금 더 시간이 지나야 알 수 있겠으나 서구 중심을 탈피하여 아직 ‘모던’이라고 불리는 시기에 세계 각국의 모더니즘을 발굴하고 재조명 한다는 데에서 유의미하다고 할 것이다.This paper aims to introduce the new modernist studies and investigate its significances and contradictions. In the 1990s, the genealogy of modernism and modernity reached an entirely new phase under the influence of globalization and postcolonial studies. Scholars began to expand the study of modernism and modernity in terms of space and time, modifying the scope of their research from a Western-centric modernism/modernity to that of other regions and periods. The new modernist studies enlarges the field without restricting its object to high culture, and thus achieved temporal and spatial diversity in its discourse. The movement was accelerated with the establishment of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) in 1999 and the ensuing publication of its journal, Modernism/Modernity. However, such approaches have the potential to distort domestic scholarship, for which Janet Poole serves as a good example when she wrote When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea (2014), awarded in the following year by MSA. For she is quite different from Korean scholars in terms of the object of study. The new modernist studies are still important as they build the foundation for the expansion and diversification of modernism, but their follow-up studies will also be significant.

The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945. By Sunyoung Park . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015. xiv, 333 pp. ISBN: 9780674417175 (cloth). - When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea. By Janet Poole . New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. xii, 286 pp. ISBN: 9780231165181 (cloth, also available as e-book).

The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945. By Sunyoung Park . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015. xiv, 333 pp. ISBN: 9780674417175 (cloth). - When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea. By Janet Poole . New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. xii, 286 pp. ISBN: 9780231165181 (cloth, also available as e-book).

When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea by Janet Poole

When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea by Janet Poole

The Vernacular Aesthetics of Conte Adaptations of Western Films in Late Colonial Korea

Abstract When four contes were serialized under the title of “Yŏnghwa esŏ odǔn kkongt’ǔ” (contes adapted from films; hereafter Cinema Conte) in the Chosŏn ilbo (Chosŏn daily) in 1937, they provided an important assessment of imperial Japan’s success with its cinema control polices in colonial Korea. The 1934 Regulation Ordinance for Motion Pictures stipulated that Japan begin reducing the number of Western film screenings in the colony to protect both the growing Japanese and colonial cinema. The policy’s full effect was expected to materialize by 1937. Cinema Conte’s adaptation process of four Western films into contes reflects this context of Western films’ reception in colonial Korea in 1937. The four authors of Cinema Conte highlight Japan’s institutional restrictions on Western films and the colonial Koreans resultant sense of deprivation by transforming Western movie satires into contes, a genre considered marginal at the time, while directing their satire against the contemporary, politically induced distortion of colonial Korean’s cultural experience of Western films. In this sense, Cinema Conte represents a political aesthetic, or aesthetic politics, which illustrates the unique emotional toll the geopolitical status as a colony had on Koreans. At the same time it performed the cultural work of sublimating Koreans’ frustrated passion into potent pathos.

The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea by Christopher P. Hanscom, and: When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea by Janet Poole (review)

The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea by Christopher P. Hanscom, and: When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea by Janet Poole (review)

When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea

When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea

When the future disappears: the modernist imagination in late colonial Korea

When the future disappears: the modernist imagination in late colonial Korea

Bodies for empire: biopolitics, reproduction, and sexual knowledge in late colonial Korea.

This paper explores the history of the biomedical construction of women's bodies as social bodies in the formation of colonial modernity in Korea. To do so, I engage with Michel Foucault's concepts of governmentality and biopolitics and the postcolonial history of medicine that has critically revisited these Foucauldian notions. These offer critical insights into the modern calculation of population and the biomedical gaze on female bodies on the Korean Peninsula under Japan's colonial rule (1910-1945). Foucauldian reflections on governmentality and colonial medicine can also shed light on the role of biomedical physicians in the advancement of colonial biopolitics. Biomedical physicians-state and non-state employees This paper explores the history of the biomedical construction of women's bodies as social bodies in the formation of colonial modernity in Korea. To do so, I engage with Michel Foucault's concepts of governmentality and biopolitics and the postcolonial history of medicine that has critically revisited these Foucauldian notions. These offer critical insights into the modern calculation of population and the biomedical gaze on female bodies on the Korean Peninsula under Japan's colonial rule (1910-1945). Foucauldian reflections on governmentality and colonial medicine can also shed light on the role of biomedical physicians in the advancement of colonial biopolitics. Biomedical physicians-state and non-state employees and colonizers and colonized alike - served as key agents investigating, knowing, and managing, as well as proliferating a discourse about, women's bodies and reproduction during Japan's empire-building. In particular, this paper sheds light on the processes by which Korean women's bodies became the objects of intense scrutiny as part of an attempt to quantify, as well as maximize, the total population in late colonial Korea. In the aftermath of the establishment of the Manchurian puppet state in 1932, Japanese imperial and colonial states actively sought to mobilize Koreans as crucial human resources for the further penetration of Japan's imperial holdings into the Chinese continent. State and non-state medical doctors meticulously interrogated, recorded, and circulated knowledge about the sexual and conjugal practices and reproductive life of Korean women in the agricultural sector, for the purposes of measuring and increasing the size, health, and vitality of the colonial population. At the heart of such medical endeavors stood the Investigative Committee for Social Hygiene in Rural Korea and Japan-trained Korean medical students/physicians, including Chóe Ŭg-sŏk, who carried out a social hygiene study in the mid-1930s. Their study illuminates the ways in which Korean women's bodies entered the modern domain of scientific knowledge at the intersection of Japan's imperialism, colonial governmentality, and biomedicine. A critical case study of the Investigative Committee's study and Chóe can set the stage for clarifying the vestiges as well as the reformulation of knowledge, ideas, institutions, and activities of colonial biopolitics in the divided Koreas.

Matters of Fact: Language, Science, and the Status of Truth in Late Colonial Korea

This article addresses the status of the fact in literary and historical discourses in late colonial Korea, focusing on the elaboration of the relationship between scientific and literary truths primarily in the work of philosopher and critic Sŏ Insik (1906–?). It points to a growing tendency in late 1930s and early 1940s Korea to question the veracity of the fact (or of empiricism more broadly) in an environment where the enunciation of the colonial subject had been rendered problematic and objective statements had arguably lost their connection with social reality. In a period when the relationship between signifier and referent had come into question, how did this major critic understand the relationship between science and literature, or between truth and subjectivity? Sŏ warns against a simplistic apprehension of the notion of truth as unilaterally equivalent with what he calls “scientific truth” ( kwahakchŏk chilli )—a nomological truth based on objective observation and confirmation by universal principles—and argues that a necessary complement to apparently objective truth is “literary truth” ( munhakchŏk chinsil ). Against the fixed, conceptual form of scientific thought, literary truth presents itself as an experiential truth that returns to the sensory world of the sociolinguistic subject ( chuch’e ) as a source of credibility.

The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Late Colonial Korea by Christopher P. Hanscom

The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Late Colonial Korea by Christopher P. Hanscom

Governmentality in Late Colonial Korea?

Governmentality in Late Colonial Korea?

A Woman in Kimono - Cultural Cross-dressing in the Late Colonial Korea -

A Woman in Kimono - Cultural Cross-dressing in the Late Colonial Korea -

Children’s Literature in Late Colonial Korea

Children’s Literature in Late Colonial Korea

A Sentimental Journey: Mapping the Interior Frontier of Japanese Settlers in Colonial Korea

This article explores the role of affect and sentiment in shaping cross-cultural encounters in late colonial Korea, as seen and experienced through the eyes of Japanese men and women who grew up in Seoul. By interweaving the oral and written testimonies of former settlers who came of age on the peninsula between the late 1920s and the end of colonial rule in 1945, the paper attempts to reconstruct their emotional journey into adulthood as young offspring of empire: specifically, how they apprehended colonialism, what they felt when encountering different segments of the Korean population, and in what ways their understanding of the world and themselves changed as a result of these interactions. Focusing on the intimate and everyday zones of contact in family and school life, this study more broadly offers a way to understand colonialism without reducing complex local interactions to abstract mechanisms of capital and bureaucratic rule.

Japanese Narratives on Life in Late-Colonial Korea: From Wartime to Repatriation

Japanese Narratives on Life in Late-Colonial Korea: From Wartime to Repatriation