Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema: Modernity Arrives Again (review)

Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema makes a major contribution to our understanding of colonial and postcolonial modernity by demonstrating how changing representations of gendered subjects are key to the ways in which Korean intellectuals, writers, and fi lmmakers negotiate pre-1945 colonial regimes of knowledge, as well as post-1945 nation building. Kelly Jeong moves from the 1930s to the 1960s, unpacking a series of crises linked to Japanese colonialism (1910-45), decolonization in the immediate aftermath of Japan's surrender (1945-48), the Korean War (1950-53), and the push for modernization/economic development begun in the early 1960s under the Park Chung Hee regime. Through incisive readings of key literary and fi lmic texts, Jeong offers a powerful account of the ways in which these historical crises center on the relations among gender, class, and nation.

Jeong's provocative analyses of representations of New Women in literary texts such as Yi Kwangsu's 1917 Heartless (Mujŏng), Yŏm Sangsŏp's 1931 Three Generations (Samdae), Ch'ae Mansik's 1937 Muddy Water (T'angnyu), and the life trajectory of the well-known New Woman, Na Hyesŏk, complicates the divide between metropole and colony by showing how the colonial modern redefi nes center and periphery in terms of a multilayered set of relations that necessarily includes men/women, educated/noneducated, and wealthy/poor (chapter 1). Here, Jeong theorizes the position occupied by New Women as both paradoxical and anachronistic: paradoxical insofar as the appearance of the New Woman points simultaneously to freedom (the emergence of women in the public sphere) and continued marginalization (on both the economic and sexual registers); anachronistic in the provision of a vision of possibility allowed in the future but denied in the present. Jeong supplements her analysis of the sexualized, marginalized, yet, at least partially, emancipated New Woman with a demonstration of the abject, undermined masculinity of impoverished fi gures in the works of such 1930s writers as Yi Sang, Kim Yujŏng, and Ch'ae Mansik (pp. 21-22). We thus see how the shifting relations themselves among gender, class, and nation constitute the colonial modern. At the same time, Jeong's linkage of the fi gure of the New Woman to a threatened masculinity allows us to consider post-1945 iterations of this relation, particularly in the later representations of the "Western Princess" (yanggongju) and penniless men in camptown fiction.

The end of Japanese rule in August 1945 marked the beginning of competing narratives of the colonial past. These narratives took different forms, and central among them were the collaboration confessionals written by major colonial-period literary fi gures such as Yi Kwangsu, Ch'ae Mansik, Yi T'aejun, and Chi Haryŏn. Jeong convincingly shows how the issue of collaboration—which remains, to this day, key to the imagining of colonial pasts and the legitimizing of postcolonial regimes in the two Koreas—cannot be meaningfully addressed without taking masculinity into account (chapter 2). As Jeong points out, to author one's confession is to maintain a certain masculinist authority over the past. At the same time, the choice not to confess can also be made in the name of manliness. Ch'oe Namsŏn, for example, refused to pen a collaboration confessional precisely for this reason (p. 37).

Jeong takes us from the 1945-48 period into the 1950s, probing the crisis of masculinity and nationhood encountered in the aftermath of the Korean War (chapter 3). Jeong focuses on the works of three writers in the 1955-60 period, Son Ch'angsŏp, Yi Pŏmsŏn, and Sŏ Kiwŏn. She traces the different ways in which short stories by these three writers address the postwar condition by way of gender relations. In "Rainy Day" ("Pionŭn nal," 1953), Son Ch'angsŏp offers an extended treatment of the despair often noted as...