脫식민 초기(1945.8~1950.5), 남한국가 엘리트의 아시아紀行記와 아시아表象

Abstract

From the race-and region-oriented view of the world, not a few post-colonial South Korean texts conceived the Aisa as the foundational entity for their own identification and development. This meant that the Asia was imagined as an entity alternative to the contemporary hegemon United States of America. This imagination threatened to nullify the epistemology necessary for the construction of the States as a hegemon over East Asia and also South Korea. Faced with this problematics, ruling elite of contemporary South Korean state had to reconstruct the major imagination of the Asia shared by multitudes of South Korean people and actually did so with a veriety of cultural projects and products such as travelogues to the Asia written by South Korean elite in governmental, political, cultural and other realms. As the major imaginations concerned did, the travelogues also spatialized the Asia as the long history and traditional culture. That is, the texts represented the Asia as the entity of long history which shared the common traditional religion, philosophy and culture, and the modern experience that Asian people got victimized by Western colonialism, and accordingly were to unite for their common interest. In a word, The travelogues identified the Asia as the entity of common interests caused by history and culture. At the same time, the travelogues represented the Asia, in terms of ‘civilization’, the space with no civilization. This civilizational representation was followed by historical representation. That is, the Asia was represented as what it historically belonged to the past, in other words, the ancient or feudal. This temporalization was illustrated in the representation of Egypt, where the country was presented as the old state, and, one step farther, as the ancient one. The imagination of Egypt rendered ancient the Orient represented by Egypt, and the Asia in extension. This series of temporal identification of the Asia meant that the area has stagnated with no historical development. This temporalization of the Asia, in turn, was to represent it as an ahistorical space, and accordingly as the space of no culture insofar as contemporarily culture was conceived as historical achievement of humans. This constructed Asia, however, was never stable nor settled, it was always contested within the text per se. The text contained the fissures and collisions within itself. That is, the text denied the imagined homogeneity of the Asia against its other of the West/Oxident, and even within the self of the Asia. The text represented Asia as the space composed of different races with different cultures. This representation meant that they had no common interest which united them. Ultimately it led to nullification of the Asia as an entity and accordingly the contradiction of the necessity of their solidarity. This nullification and contradiction epistemologically de-constructed the Asia which was contemporarily imagined as the entity alternative to hegemonic America. It is this de-construction that determined one of the political implications of the travelogues. Other implications of the travelogues could be confirmed in their politics that they had the cultural potentials of persuading South Korean masses to embrace the hegemony of the “highly modernized" States in terms of civilization and modernism. In this sense, what the travelogues constructed constituted the preliminary work for the ultimate construction of the American hegemony over South Korea and the East Asia in extension. With this in mind, we can conclude the travelogues were the cultural products for the ideational justification of the ‘alliance’ of South Korean state with regionally new hegemon in the post-colonial era, the States. Also we can say that the travelogues meant to ideologically justify the positioning of South Korean state in the American bloc with the seemingly trans-racial and -regional ideologies of modernism and civilization. These justifications constituted the political implications of the travelogues to the Asia produced by the contemporary ruling elite in post-colonial and post-War era.