1960년대 한국과 오키나와 소설에 나타난 미국 패권주의의 인식과 비판 - 남정현의 「분지」와 오시로 다쓰히로(大城立裕)의 「칵테일 파티」를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper discusses how U.S. military hegemony is perceived in the fictions of Nam Jung-hyun and Oshiro Tatsuhiro. Nam Jung-hyun is asking about the privileged status of the U.S. Forces Korea in “Land of Excrement”. It was very difficult to ask about the nature of America in Korea in the mid-1960s. After the Korean War, the U.S. military had a privileged position in Korea, and the Park Chung-hee administration in Korea was using it as a political leverage to oppress its opponents. In the mid-1960s, South Korea reached its peak due to the signing of the Korea-Japan Agreement and the dispatch of troops to Vietnam. Nam Jung-hyun believes that the U.S. was behind the ongoing situation regardless of the will of Koreans. He asks Hong Man-soo's remarks and actions in "Land of Excellence" about the nature of American military hegemony. However, even if it was a fiction, it was a huge political taboo in Korea under anti-communist law to ask questions about the nature of the United States. In “Land of Excrement”, Hong Man-soo's rape of the wife of the U.S. military resulted in the emergence of an allegorical narrative that he would face a nuclear attack by the Pentagon because of this political taboo. Oshiro Tatsuhiro is exploring the political situation in Okinawa under the U.S. military occupation system through “Cocktail Party”. Unlike Nam Jung-hyun, Oshiro Tatsuhiro's fiction was written as a method of realism. The Okinawans, Japanese, Chinese, and Americans in the novel all have different memories of the Asia-Pacific War. Those memories confuse the characters with conflicting values such as domination and subordination, invasion and sacrifice, occupation and obedience. In particular, the main character, “I” is the perpetrator of the Chinese invasion and suffers from internal divisions as a “victim” of the occupation of the U.S. military. In the fiction, the main character's daughter is raped by the U.S. military, but the reality of Okinawa, which is not legally authorized to punish it, is sharply revealed. With Okinawa's lack of sovereignty and citizenship sharply highlighted, the novel asks about the nature of the colonialism of the United States occupying Okinawa.