포스트식민의 장소만들기 - 인천을 중심으로

Abstract

This study explores the better ways to promote and utilize places of Incheon in a manner that overcome the dichotomous thinking of its colonized history by critically reviewing the current place-marketing strategy of the city. Incheon, which opened its port and adopted modern culture, preserves the modern heritage from its colonial past and utilizes it as cultural resources in creating its identity. Under this strategy, the city’s places of the Japanese concession area and the Chinese concession area have become the exhibition of modernism, full of exotic images reminiscent of modern Japan or China. Preservations of these historic places mean Incheon does not deny its colonized past. But a closer look would reveal that based on the dichotomous thinking of modernity, the city’s strategy makes unseen the internal motivation of modernity by only highlighting modernity from the outside, remaining within the unilinear frame of history. This article argues for the importance of restoring modernity from within which arose around the then open port, and of using it in building the city’s identity. Along with the increase of population and urban growth in the foreign concessions of Incheon, Koreans were forced to move and resettled in a place not very far from the concessions. There they developed their own culture while providing labor to the colonized society. Soon this new settlement, now called Baedari, became a national place for Koreans, as opposed to the open port, where the subjugated people could develop national identity and autonomous modernity. But in the process of modernization since then, the significance of Baedari has always been neglected. Rediscoveing the historicity of the place is essential to plan for new practices of post-colonialism. Properly preserving and utilizing this place in the city will not only lead to changing the city into a meaningfully post-colonial place as a whole, but also to the construction of plural histories questioning the unilinear view of history.