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Korean writers and filmmakers crossed literary and visual cultures in multilayered ways under Japanese colonial rule (1910--1945). Taking advantage of new modes and media that emerged in the early twentieth century, these artists sought subtle strategies for representing the realities of colonialism and global modernity. Theodore Hughes begins by unpacking the relations among literature, film, and art in Korea's colonial period, paying particular attention to the emerging proletarian movement, literary modernism, nativism, and wartime mobilization. He then demonstrates how these developments informed the efforts of post-1945 writers and filmmakers as they confronted the aftershocks of colonialism and the formation of separate regimes in North and South Korea. Hughes puts neglected Korean literary texts, art, and film into conversation with studies on Japanese imperialism and Korea's colonial history. At the same time, he locates post-1945 South Korean cultural production within the transnational circulation of texts, ideas, and images that took place in the first three decades of the Cold War.
The incorporation of the Korean Peninsula into the global Cold War order, Hughes argues, must be understood through the politics of the visual. In Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea, he identifies ways of seeing that are central to the organization of a postcolonial culture of division, authoritarianism, and modernization.
List of contents
List of IllustrationsIntroduction1. Visuality and the Colonial Modern: The Technics of Proletarian Culture2. Visible and Invisible States: Liberation3. Ambivalent Anticommunism: The Politics of Despair and the Erotics of Language4. Development as Devolution: Overcoming Communism and the "Land of Excrement" Incident5. Return to the Colonial Present: TranslationPostscriptNotesSelected BibliographyIndex
About the author
Theodore Hughes is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Korean Studies in the Humanities in Columbia’s EALAC. He is the author of Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (Columbia University Press, 2012), which won the James B. Palais Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies.
Summary
Korean writers and filmmakers layered literary and visual cultures in numerous ways under Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945). Taking advantage of new modes and media that emerged in the early twentieth century, these artists sought and utilized subtle strategies for representing the realities of colonialism and global modernity. Theodore Hughes begins by unpacking the interactions among literature, film, and art during this period, paying particular attention to the emerging proletarian movement, literary modernism, nativism, and wartime mobilization. He then demonstrates how these developments informed the efforts of post-1945 writers and filmmakers as they confronted the aftershocks of colonialism, war, and the formation of separate regimes in North and South Korea.
