Cartography of Catastrophe: Pre-Colonial Surveys, Post-Colonial Vampires, and the Plight of Korean Modernity

This article takes a look at a trajectory of the South Korean cinema from its contentious emergence to its current global dissemination. The cinematic instances of the pre-colonial Great Han Empire (1897–1910) and contemporary post-colonial Republic of Korea (1948–present) will be compared and the negotiations between the national and the transnational, which have run from the catastrophic and the cartographical as South Korea maintains a state of emergency, will be discussed. This discourse is also a way in which we can revisit the scenes of the IMF crisis, arguably bear similarities to the shock experienced during the Great Han Empire, is cited as evidence of the threats that “big countries” such as China and America could pose to unification.