Politics and Aesthetics of Saenghwal in Postwar South Korea, 1953-1959
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Picturing Everyday Life: Politics and Aesthetics of Saenghwal in Postwar South Korea, 1953-1959 Jae Won Chung Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 © 2017 Jae Won Chung All rights reserved ABSTRACT Picturing Everyday Life: Politics and Aesthetics of Saenghwal in Postwar South Korea, 1953-1959 Jae Won Chung Following the collapse of the Japanese Empire (1945) and the devastation of the Korean War (1950-1953), the question of how to represent and imagine “everyday life” or “way of life” (saenghwal, 生活) became a focal point of post-colonial and Cold War contestations. For example, President Syngman Rhee’s administration attempted to control the discourse of “New Life” (shinsaenghwal) by linking the spatio-temporality of the everyday to reconstruction and modernization. “Everyday life” was also a concept of strategic interest to the United States, whose postwar hegemonic ambitions in East Asia meant spreading “the truth” about an idealized vision of American way of life through government agencies such as the United States Information Service (USIS). These ideas and representations were designed to interpellate the South Korean people into a particular kind of regulatory relationship with their bodies and minds, their conduct of their day-to-day lives, their vision of themselves within the nation and the “Free World.” “Everyday life” became, in other words, part-and-parcel of Cold War governmentality’s mechanism of subjectification. Overly privileging these top-down discourses and techniques, however, can foreclose a nuanced understanding of a rich and complex set of negotiations over the meaning of saenghwal underway in both elite intellectual and popular imagination. Through my examination of literature, criticism, reportage, human-interest stories, government bulletins, philosophical essays, photography (artistic, popular, journalistic, archival, exhibition), cartoons, and educational and feature films, I characterize this period broadly in terms of “postwar crisis of modernity.” If “colonial modernity” in Korea had consisted of tensions and collaborations between colonialism, enlightenment, and modernization, then the emergent neocolonial order of the Cold War would give rise to a reconfiguration of this problematic: national division, South Korea’s semi- sovereignty vis-à-vis the U.S. and the denial of decolonization accompanied by the false promise of democratic freedom and American-style prosperity. Negotiations of this crisis can be found across urban and rural space, contesting the representation and dissemination of universalist and developmentalist “everyday life,” which was linked to the postwar restoration of the enlightenment subject. The stakes of these contestations through the framework of saenghwal could be ontological, aesthetic, economic, affective or universalist, and were articulated across popular and intellectual registers. While works of recent English-language scholarship in modern Korean history have productively explored the question of everyday life during the colonial period and in DPRK after liberation, no work thus far has examined the significance of the relationship between intermediality and saenghwal in the cultural field of ROK in the postwar 1950s. In addition to building on the current trend of scholarship that emphasizes the continuity between colonial and post-colonial cultural formations, my analysis of literature opens up future avenues of research for those interested in understanding literature’s intersection with modes of reportage, photography, and mass visuality. The chapter on the countryside draws from a diverse array of cultural productions to analyze a space that has traditionally been discussed within the limited geopolitical context of U.S. aid and development; no scholar to my knowledge has undertaken medium-specific inquiry to think through ontological and aesthetic negotiations unfolding in the countryside. My chapter on film culture reads the postwar debates around plagiarism/imitation, melodrama/sinp’a, and realism/neorealism through the gendering discourse of “everyday feelings” (saenghwal kamjŏng), and analyzes understudied films of the era with particular attention paid to their exploration of postwar sentiment. Finally, the last chapter intervenes on the wealth of existing scholarship on The Family of Man in visual studies by situating it within a broader formation of the postwar enlightenment subject as a democratic modernizing ideal. By focusing on the affective premise of this ideal, I contribute to the existing scholarship on theories of everyday life, sovereignty, and Cold War culture, which have tended to neglect the role of intermediation and affective interpellation in the governmentality of everyday life. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. ii Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iv Dedication .................................................................................................................................... viii Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Everyday Life and Intermediality: Theorizing the Cultural Field of Postwar South Korea Chapter 1 ........................................................................................................................................42 Life on the Street: Fact and Fiction in the Urban Mapping of Saenghwal Chapter 2 ........................................................................................................................................92 Beyond Naturalism: Literature and the Postwar Crisis of Representation Chapter 3 ......................................................................................................................................138 Contesting Audio-Visual Enlightenment: Re-imagining the Rural Everyday Chapter 4 ......................................................................................................................................201 The Battle Over “Everyday Feelings”: Gendered Negotiation Between Sinp’a, Melodrama, and Realism Chapter 5 ......................................................................................................................................260 Overcoming Postwar Atomization: Affective Adaptation of Steichen’s The Family of Man in the Popular Press Epilogue .......................................................................................................................................317 Beyond the 1950s: The Everyday as Permanent Crisis Selected Bibliography ..................................................................................................................330 i LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. President Syngman Rhee’s “The New Life Movement.” ...............................................13 Figure 2. Im Ŭngsik’s “Restricted Zone” (1950) ...........................................................................29 Figure 3. Outside a USIS office in South Korea ............................................................................32 Figure 4. Poem and photograph .....................................................................................................33 Figure 5. A scene from a “camera- novel” ....................................................................................33 Figure 6. Intermedial reflexivity across comics and street photography ......................................44 Figure 7. Image-text in the form of streetscape-reportage .............................................................49 Figure 8. The end of the tour .........................................................................................................53 Figure 9. Intermedial reflexivity as a “nod” to the influence of Japanese photography ...............56 Figure 10. Im Sŏkche, “Loading and Unloading” (1948) & “Miners” (1952). .............................58 Figure 11. Han Yŏngsu, “Poultry Anybody?” Namdaemun Market (1957) .................................64 Figure 12. Intermedial reflexivity across street photography and cinematic visuality .................66 Figure 13. Uncanny encounters between human bodies and commoditized mannequins ............67 Figure 14. Looking at foreigners looking at Korea .......................................................................80 Figure 15. “Seoul’s Foreign Zone” ................................................................................................82 Figure 16. “Ideology and Reality” by Chŏng Un’kyŏng ............................................................100 Figure 17. T’aesu and Sŏnyŏng look inward instead of gazing outward at the landscape. .........120 Figure 18. From the opening page of “White Paper Beard”. .......................................................133 Figure 19. Critiquing the City ......................................................................................................142 Figure 20. Profile on rural enlightenment leader Kim Yŏngja ....................................................164 Figure 21. Stills from “Fundamental Education: Rural Enlightenment Campaign” ...................172 Figure 23. “The Lighthouse on the Streets” .................................................................................174