권력도시의 행위자와 문화기술의 벡터(vector)

Abstract

To understand the trends and prospects of research on daily lives in the colonial era, it is worth looking into Todd Henry’s Assimilating Seoul(2020) which traces the patterns of conflict and competition among the ruling power, Korean elites, and the public around public spaces found in the colonial era. Unlike previous studies that were focused on figuring out ‘the power of colonial rule strategies”, Todd Henry threw light on the lives of marginalized Koreans that were not much different from those of people put on probation and how they had to “float between obligations of subordinates and the rights of citizens”. Todd Henry aimed to analyze in-depth the way how individuals strived to understand how power impacted spatiality, instead of focusing on the agenda of assimilation conceived in the Japanese Government-General. So what kind of relationships were formed between the outsiders in the colonial era and public spaces, and what meanings did they give to such spaces and bent the imperial rhetoric of assimilation in a creative, unexpected way? On the basis of the academic achievements of research on daily lives in the colonial era, this article examines the historical significance Todd Henry’s 『Assimilating Seoul』(2020) newly acquired. It not only captures the ‘misaligned’ lives of individuals that cannot be explained simply through the binary framework of colonizers and the colonized, but also examines how various actors with different modern orientations in the era found ways to overcome the colonial rule as their desires for survival, profit, entertainment of were reflected in public spaces. Such examination carries significance in that it goes beyond achieving the minimum goal of research on daily lives in the colonial era and aims to serve as the milestone of future academic studies and secure a maximum outlook conceivable at this point.