Beyond Humanity and Sovereign Species: Animality and Bestial Ambivalence in South Korean Anti-Communist Visual Culture

Lunch Lecture by Dr Yongwoo Lee (Affiliated fellow IIAS).

In this IIAS lunch lecture, Dr Lee will talk about the rhetoric of nation-state, mono-ethnic society, and sub-imperialism in relation to Park Chung-Hee regime’s own biopower and necropolitics by examining the representation of South Korean children’s manhwa (comics and animated films) in the 1970s and 80s. As an efficient form of disseminating anti-communist ideology and a residual fascist ethos, the narrative structure of comics such as Ttorichangkun (1978) and The Adventure of Haedori (1981) constituted powerful propaganda for supporting dictatorial governmentality in South Korea. It reinforced the individual motivation and socio-cultural morals and values of Korean society while actively appropriating the representation of popular Hollywood images such as Marvel Comics characters Hulk and Wonder Woman while also conjuring a primitive white masculinity drawn from Burroughs’ Tarzan. The paradoxical relations between figurations of the other in these anti-communist manhwa lie in their racial representation and animal characters, depicting North Koreans as demonized non-human subjects, or animality itself that implies a bifocal politics of sovereignty and a separate category of otherness to which moral and political considerations do not apply. Thus, this lecture focalizes the popular translation of the South Korean anti-communist propaganda imaginary and its implicit analogy vis-à-vis North Koreans in a derogatory fashion and “Americanized” national heroes as an agency of anti-communism and democracy that demonstrate a discursive displacement of human/animal/sub-humanity and bipolar sovereignty in the form of Korean visual culture during the Cold War era.

Keywords:  Cold War Popular Culture; Interiority/Exteriority; Postcolonial Imaginary; Anti-Communist Comics; Dictatorial Governmentality

Dr Yongwoo Lee is affiliated fellow of IIAS-ISEAS. He is a media historian and cultural studies scholar. He received his Ph.D. from the department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University in 2010 and an M.A. in Media and Cultural Studies from Seoul National University. He was a visiting assistant professor in Cornell University’s East Asia Program (2012-2013), serving before that as a Mellon-Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow in Cornell's Society for the Humanities (2010-2012) and research fellow in the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies at the University of Tokyo (2006-2007). His primary research and teaching interests focus on media and cultural studies, popular culture in Asia, film theory, critical musicology of East Asia, intellectual history of wartime Japan and postwar Korea, and post/colonial historiography.

Inline image: Gancheopjamneun Ttorijanggun(1979), directed by Kim Cheong-gi.