Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier by Theodore H. Hughes. (review)

The call for literary scholars to “always historicize” is now, in its latest round after the effective collapse of the poststructuralist project, some thirty years old, but we have done a fairly poor job of it. As dismissive as we are of our colleagues in the more empirical disciplines when they cite novels as evidentiary proof-texts, our naive tracings of the authorial imagination against the backdrop of a historical “narrative” typically leave professional historians scratching their heads and the genius of that imagination hardly well served.

But now there is Theodore Hughes. His book Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea is a tour de force in its sophisticated approach to both literature and history. An impatient and almost angry polemic at times, yes, but Hughes’s engaged passion, ignited by his dissent from standard literary history’s take on the colonial period, animates every chapter of this study of Korea’s twentieth century, not just the decades after Liberation and before 1988. With the broad knowledge and critical intelligence he has marshaled in its pages, Hughes not only elevates Anglophone work on modern Korean literature, as well as criticism, film, and painting, to new levels, but also leaves a new high-water mark for East Asian cultural studies in general.

When he notes in his second chapter that English-language scholarship may have highlighted political history at the expense of the cultural (p. 61), Hughes puts us on notice early that his book “looks at the ways in which the new post-1945 South Korean culture was formed in relation both to representations of what now became thought of as the colonial past and to the 1945 Cold War division of the peninsula” (p. 1). Until the establishment of democracy in the late 1980s this culture was marked by three disavowals—of the colonial histories of proletarian literature and later mobilization and imperialization—and the contemporary erasure of North Korean cultural production. In the first half of his book he outlines how “the relation among literature, art, and film is central to the formation of colonial proletarian, modernist, and mobilized subjects,” as illustrated in his analysis of Kim Kijin’s arguments with Im Hwa over the ideological work of the proletarian “film-novel.” He then moves to considering “the way in which a constellation of texts refashioned ways of seeing that emerged in the colonial period into a distribution of the visible and invisible that enabled the imagination of separate geospaces on either side of the thirty-eighth parallel,” followed by tracing “the movement between the statist summoning of postcolonial, territorialized “South Korean” subjects and the appearance, often at the margins of literary and filmic texts, of early forms of Cold War nonalignment” (p. 92).

Hughes is interested in the aptly phrased “distribution of the sensible” (p. 10) in the formation of the two Koreas in the wake of Liberation and the consolidation of both in the Cold War. This sets the tone for what is most striking about this book: its interrogation of the verbal’s dialectic rather than supplemental relation with the visual, a project buttressed by his reading, never cosmetic, as in so much of ambitious East Asian studies, of theorists of the visual such as W. T. J. Mitchell, Benjamin Laclau, and especially Giorgio Agamben. Pursuing the “visual turn” that has now supplanted the “linguistic turn” in cultural studies, Hughes convincingly argues “modern Korean literature emerges in relation to the pictorial” against the backdrop of the “staging of a global, colonial modernity [that] involves a hypothetical equivalence that is once verbal and visual” (pp. 6–7). “Visuality” often means for Hughes no more than what words have had to say about it. To say that “Division on the Korean peninsula cannot be understood without taking into consideration a visual politics” (p. 9), as the DPRK becomes alternately “invisible” and “visible,” is to reduce...