Postcolonial aspiration and contestation : politics and poetics of nationalist discourses in two national museums of South Korea

• Main Author: Chun, Kyung Hyo
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43423

After colonial liberation from Japan in 1945, Koreans have been eager to establish their sovereignty and to elevate national pride through nationalism. In South Korea, the nationalist discourse is ubiquitous, and generated top-down directly from the government as well as bottom-up in both traditional media and new social media. Emphasizing the unity, longevity, and distinctiveness of the Korean people by promoting nationalism based on the idea of ethnic homogeneity was a way of both redressing a traumatic colonial past and integrating modern social theories. While the nationalist discourse in South Korea constantly reinforces the uniqueness of Korean people and the worthiness of its splendid culture asserted to be of “five thousand years,” South Korean nationalism is far from being self-sufficient. One of the most significant motivational forces for nationalist consciousness in South Korea is not self-determination but its postcoloniality. South Korea’s anticolonial self definition is a direct reaction to Japanese colonialism (1910-1945), and the aggressive pervasiveness of nationalism in contemporary South Korean society is the prescribed way of rejecting and erasing a past both undesirable and regrettable. This prescribed ethnic nationalism is extremely problematic in both its ahistoricity and increasingly conspicuous irrelevancy in the face of an increasingly multiculturalizing contemporary South Korean population. By examining the interplay between postcoloniality and nationalism, this dissertation examines the two major national museums of South Korea, the National Museum of Korea and the National Folk Museum of Korea. Conceptualizing museums as complex sites where different social, political, and cultural agendas are projected and contested, this dissertation attempts to contextualize the discourses and phenomena of nationalism and postcoloniality in contemporary South Korea within the “contact zone” of museums. While the use of “contact zone” in understanding the nature of museums is strongly informed by James Clifford’s (1997) adoption of Mary Louise Pratt’s term (Pratt 1992), this dissertation aims to broaden the scope of the concept by not limiting the discussion to the dialogue between the exhibited and the exhibitor, but by extending it to mean the process by which museums, the audience, and the society interact to generate and reinforce anticolonial nationalism in South Korea.