The Review of Korean Studies
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- P-ISSN1229-0076
- E-ISSN2773-9351
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ISSN : 1229-0076
Volatile Biopolitics: Postwar Korean Cinema’s Bodily Encounter with the Cold War
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Abstract
The dominant rhetoric of Cold War culture in the last seventy years has facilitated the dichotomous framework of South and North, good and evil, the proper and the improper, and the humanistic and the anti-humanistic. Particularly, under a dual economy of visual and corporeal regime in postwar South Korea, certain types of bodies and lives have been incorporated into the political realm of sovereign subjects while others have been excluded. However, there were also liminal, border-crossing, and volatile bodies such as North Korean refugees, secret spies, military sex workers, and uprooted female workers that were located at the margin of law and sovereign territory. The paper probes into the problematic topography of inclusion and exclusion concerning the life of North Koreans under Cold War biopolitics. For instance, such figures as shown in The Hand of Destiny (1954), Aimless Bullet (1961), Kinship (1963), and The Devil’s Stairway (1964) ask us to inquire peculiar ways of configuring Cold War biopolitics based on the production of healthy, strong, united, and social bodies. To speculate these figures based on the framework of Giorgio Agamben, the bare life of North Koreans in postwar South Korea has been something that needs to be included as an exceptional state for the foundation of sovereign power but at the same time abandoned for the sake of its development. Through comparative analyses of these films, this paper argues that the paradoxical dialectics between sovereign power and non-sovereign bodies makes the Cold War biopolitics of South Korean culture inevitably volatile. This work seeks to reframe the scope of biopolitics in post-38th parallel era through the filmic articulations of non-sovereign bodies in order to better understand the relationship between power, body, and life in Cold War Korea.
- keywords
- Cold War biopolitics, postwar Korean cinema, North Korean refugees, sovereign power, the bare life of non-sovereign body
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