‘남양(南洋)’ 표상과 지정학적 상상력

Abstract

Just after the outbreak of the Asia‐Pacific War, the South Seas, ‘The Land of Everlasting Summer,’ was an object of romantic imagination, stirring up Korean intellects’ yearning for and curiosity about the unknown world. At the same time, as the region was incorporated into the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere it was geopolitically recognized as a critical area in terms of politics, economy and military. Of course, such an image was created from the view of Japanese imperialism in the process of its geographical expansion to East Asia. In colonized Chosun without any organized geopolitical knowledge of the South Seas, the knowledge and representation created by the view were accepted, and in the process of reproduction, Chosun intellects’ unconscious desires were exposed. Centering on the region ‘the South Seas’, they restructured the geopolitical topology of the East and the West, and repositioned colonized Chosun imaginatively in the restructured East. It enabled them to overcome the limited and closed spatial sense and boundary perception of Chosun as a local of the empire and ‘colonized Chosun’ and to have spatial sense and boundary perception that see Chosun in Asia and in the world. In this sense, Chosun intellects’ curious view to and representation of the South Seas captured as a new object by Japanese geopolitics, which is closely related to the ideology of the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, was ‘a geopolitical imaginary.’