In concluding this riveting study, Theodore Hughes describes his book as a cultural history of South Korea (p. 205). That is an understatement, as much as the book's title is an understatement. Rather than a classical cultural history, this book is a study of the formation and development of the South Korean cultural field as meant by Pierre Bourdieu (p. 11, n.17). As a study of the formation of South Korea's cultural field, the book deals with far more than literature and film. Also, period-wise, the book is not limited to the Cold War era (to be understood here as the first three decades of the Republic of Korea, or ROK), but also offers fascinating chapters on both the colonial and the liberation (1945–48) periods. The scholarly modesty that becomes Hughes shines through in the depth and breadth of his research, but has unfortunately stood in the way of a more audacious and deserving title. His is a sophisticated, rich, and tantalizing study that should appeal not only to literature and film scholars, but to historians in general. Too dense for undergraduate students, this is the kind of scholarship that a graduate seminar can feast on: empirically grounded, theoretically sound, analytically daring, and above all succinct and compact.
The roots of this project are to be found in the 1988 lifting in South Korea of a ban on numerous writers (and their works) who had gone north in the postliberation period, and the effect this has had on the development of literature studies in the course of South Korean democratization. Conversant with contemporary South Korean scholarship, Hughes integrates this rediscovery into a reflection on what the excision of these authors and their oeuvre from the South Korean canon has meant for the ways in which South Korea's past and futures could be imagined. By returning to the culture debates of the colonial period and subsequently tracing the development of these debates into the politically confined space of postliberation South Korea and the global Cold War order, Hughes is particularly sensitive to the shifting positions of the different actors in the cultural field over the course of the colonial period, during the U.S. occupation period (1945–48), and following the establishment of the ROK (1948). He does so from the perspective of loss and yearning in reaction to the excision of the north from the ideological and national landscape of Korea.
The body of the book consists of five chronologically sequential but otherwise self-contained chapters that can easily be read separately thanks to the ample cross-referencing and mutual overlap between the chapters. The vantage point is South Korea as Freedom's Frontier, a Cold War moniker that highlights South Korea's peripheral status in a U.S.-dominated postcolonial regional framework. What this book clearly shows throughout the successive chapters is how Korean cultural actors (and society at large) grappled with this geopolitical realignment that was as abrupt as it was imposed, first under U.S. occupation and then under a growingly authoritarian state in South Korea.
Hughes returns to the colonial period in order to reread that past and map the postliberation construction of colonial memory and amnesia. He revisits the formation of cultural and literary movements—proletarian cultural movement (KAPF), literary modernism, artistic nativism (hyangt'o), and wartime mass mobilization—and charts the different subject positions—enlightenment, proletarian, modernist, and imperialized—that consequently informed the formation of post-1945 cultural production through a process of selective forgetting and allusion to and/or appropriation of these movements and subject positions. Already during the American occupation period, a realignment of the cultural field was taking place as the territorial and political division hardened. Not only was proletarian culture excised from what became Han'guk munhak (South Korean literature), so too was the north rendered invisible and alien (a process that was equally visible north of the 38th parallel).
Visuality is a constant concern and a lens through which Hughes analyzes the formation of a Cold War South Korean cultural field, from visuality as a formative constituent of modern subjectivity, over the visual/verbal relation that defined modern Korean literature, to the visual politics of developmentalist statism and how this was contested and subverted by the likes of Ch'oe In-hun. Ch'oe In-hun's A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist (1970–72), for example, borrowed its title from Pak T'ae-wŏn's 1934 modernist novella excised from the South Korean literary canon because Pak was an “author gone north” (wŏlbuk chakka). Pak's Joycean novella relates Kubo's musings as he wanders through Seoul's modern cityscape, “bringing together modernist fragmentation and hyangt'o imaginings” (p. 44). Choe's “Kubo points to the trauma that structures division culture, the production of the North not only as past but as loss, withdrawn from the temporal and linguistic register (neither seen nor heard). . . . Through verbal representation, Kubo places this history of excision on display” (p. 185).
Hughes has done us a great service by reminding us that beyond South Korea's statist, developmentalist discourse, a resilient and diverse cultural field did not entirely succumb to the state's hegemonic anti-communist ideology. This book should be compulsory reading not only for those with an interest in Korean culture studies, but also for Korean history majors. If there is one regret, it would be that the epilogue does not hint at developments following post-Cold War democratization. Then again, the polarization of the cultural field in the post-Cold War era could be the material for a sequel to this volume. Another equally thrilling project would be an identical approach to map the formation of the North Korean cultural field. Hughes has set an example for others to follow.
