Maps of Life and Abjection: Reportage, Photography, and Literature in Postwar Seoul

Abstract

The collapse of the Japanese empire unleashed in the streets of Seoul new everyday epistemologies and affects closely tied to evolving relationships across media. This article analyzes how reportage, photography, and literature in post-liberation and post-Korean War South Korea synergistically addressed pressing postcolonial and neocolonial questions, the weight of which could be felt in the realm of daily life: What does liberation look like in the marketplace? How should we make sense of the foreign military presence in Seoul after the Korean War? What are the effects of foreign consumer goods on the minds and bodies of the people and the nation's sovereignty? The article shows how South Korean cultural actors responded to the increasing commodification of everyday life by bringing critical attention to the uneasy relationship between the body, foreign commodity-signs, and artifacts of mass visuality. These intermedial accounts succeeded in linking the granular experiences of everyday life to larger historical and geopolitical forces and making visible how the encroachment of mass media products and commodity-signs were transforming the very means by which the everyday could be represented.