Security,Nationalism and Popular Culture: Screening South Korea’s Uneasy Identity in the Early 2000s |
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Authors: | Young Chul Cho |
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Institution: | (1) Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea |
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Abstract: | By examining the cultural representations of the South Korean notion of the Self/Other in relation to its major traditional
enemy — North Korea — this article aims to capture a picture of South Korea’s discursive economy of the North, and to problematise
the South Korean identities implicated in that economy in the early 2000s. To achieve these aims, this article focuses on
representations of a successful popular South Korean film which was released in 2000, just a few months after the first inter-Korean
summit: Joint Security Area JSA. By analytically reading JSA, it is revealed that, in South Korea, the traditional discursive practices based on the Cold War thinking have been eroded.
For the South, the North is part of the Self (Korean-ness; love for the North as the same nation) and, at the same time, is
an Other (South Korean-ness; contempt for the North as an inferior state). Related to this, South Korea appears to be the
uneasy Self without a firm Other in between Korean-ness and South Korean-ness. |
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Keywords: | |
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