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Living with a Postcolonial Conundrum: Yi Yŏngil and Korean Film Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2019

Hieyoon Kim
Hieyoon Kim*
Affiliation:
Hieyoon Kim (hieyoon.kim@wisc.edu) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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Abstract

Since its publication, Yi Yŏngil's Complete history of Korean cinema (1969) has remained a seminal work of film historiography. A critical rereading of the work is required, however, to capture the paradoxes of postcolonial historiography that are created by the spatial-temporal orders of modernity in a decolonizing, non-Western society. By examining Yi's creative use of historical documentation, such as oral testimonies of filmmakers, this article considers how he offers a counter-narrative against colonialist historiography that denies Korea's agency to transform itself into a modern nation-state without Japanese annexation. However, despite his decolonizing endeavor, his work cannot fully eradicate the colonial effects that inevitably shape postcolonial subjectivity in the globalizing world. In reassessing the possibilities and predicaments of his work, this article reveals Yi's fundamental conundrum as a postcolonial writer living with the effects of colonialism, ultimately challenging the imagination of the postcolonial experience as an uninterrupted struggle to establish an autonomous nation.

Keywords

archivecolonialismComplete history of Korean cinemadecolonizationfilmKoreaoral historypostcolonial historiographyYi Yŏngil
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 78 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 601 - 620
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2019 

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