1930년대 조선문화의 정체성과 로컬 ‘향토’의 상상

Abstract

The discussion on locality by imperialist Japan in the 1930s attempted to abase the culture of Joseon down to local color, in order to localize the Joseon culture. Among other fields of popular culture, it was films and magazines that represented the provincial world, the reality of impoverished agricultural districts, and women and public morals of Joseon. In particular, movies, which were prospering in popular culture realized the local color, showed cultural colonialism by reflecting the logic behind the imperialist culture in a faithful manner. The pursuit of locality in the contemporary film industry can be a representative case in which the imperialist capital commercialized localism of the colony. On the other hand, the intellectuals of the colony studied the classics and tradition through the discussion on Joseon culture, and tried to examine the identity of Joseon culture by representing the prototype of Joseon culture and the actual farming communities in the process of writing local novels. By dint of the fissure in the spatial hierarchy of the empire and colony as a center and periphery, the writers tried to overcome the peripheral character as locals and resist Japan which was acting as a center. For example, novelist Taejun Lee, in his Paegangnaeng, tactfully avoids using the local place names which were given by imperialist Japan to localize Joseon. By virtue of this spatial imagination, they opposed the identity of Joseon as a province. Poet Seok Baik also freely creates the locality of Joseon culture, by using local language, apart from the imperialist language, wandering around and continuously creating what is local, not settling down in the central, universal space, and expressing diverse spaces and experiences based on his roaming life. The intellectuals of the colony, via this visualization, wanted to possess the identity of colonial culture that creates originality, while they were not seized by the lopsided discussion of locality by the empire or they were intersecting with that discussion. Therefore, the 1930s were a period when the features unique to Joseon were investigated, imagined, and consumed in and out of Joseon. The emergence of the things unique to Joseon implies the existence of things threatening to that uniqueness. The power and menace of the empire were indeed hierarchicalizing, colonizing, peripheralizing, and localizing the colony on the basis of gender politics; however, the elite of Joseon tried to rupture the empire´s cultural policy, by envisioning the local and summoning the nation, rather than resorting to any political means of directly overthrowing the hierarchical logic.