Abstract

This study examines the mobility regulation and discipline that persisted amid the currents of internationalization and opening during the 1980s through the case of security education films for overseas travelers—an essential component of the education program for South Koreans going abroad. With the liberalization in the policy for overseas travel, attending this educational session before departure became a prerequisite for South Koreans traveling overseas. By analyzing the content and production process of two films produced by the National Film Production Center in the early 1980s, this study argues that the securitization of imagination regarding foreign spaces, overseas travel, and new mobile subjects was implemented by the authoritarian nationstate, facing a transition from immobility to global mobility. This project of regulation and discipline, rooted in the Cold War imagination, persisted as a shadow of internationalization. The conceptual framework suggested by this study, the securitization of imagination, facilitates an understanding of a conjuncture in which Cold War social-cultural history and the history of globalization overlapped in South Korea in the 1980s.