The presence of the past: Exhibitions, memories and national identities in colonial and postcolonial Korea and Japan

This dissertation is an effort to contribute to the understanding of the politics of exhibitions in Korea and Japan across their colonial and postcolonial times. I aim to show how the colonial and postcolonial interrelations between Korea and Japan are articulated in colonial expositions and museums. I also explore how such expositions and museums become the site for the formation and transformation of colonial cultures, ideas of modernity, and national identity. In pursuing these aims, I examine the significant roles played by the historical memories of colonialism in imagining the "postcolonial" or "postwar" present of the contemporary nation. By focusing on intra-Asian tensions between Japan and Korea, I argue that the formation of Japan's modern and imperial culture was inseparable from its colonial experience in Korea. At the same time, modernity in Korea was formed under the conditions of Japanese colonialism. Further I argue that their colonial encounters have continued to shape their postcolonial symbiotic relationships.; In order to address these questions, the dissertation is organized in three interrelated parts, under the themes of "Encountering", "Remembering", and "Forgetting." Part One, "Encountering," examines the politics of colonial expositions (outside "the West") in the colony (Korea), their specific historical meanings, and the (unintended) local receptions that generated various forms of (anti-colonial) nationalism. Part Two, "Remembering," shows how the national identity of Korea is formed through a culture of "remembering" the colonial past. The general theme here is to show how colonial memories structure the political imagination of the postcolonial nation. Part Three, "Forgetting," discusses the attempts of postwar Japan to "forget" its colonial past, showing how the atomic bomb "peace" museums constitute a culture of "forgetting" the memories of Japanese colonialism in Asia and how the ambiguous presence of "colonial Korea" in Japanese peace museums indicate the difficulties of sustaining a coherent narrative of "victim-hood."; In this dissertation, by juxtaposing cultural strategies of commemoration in these two countries and times, I aim to show the ways in which the symbiotic yet ambivalent power relations of Korea and Japan are articulated in exhibition cultures and how the effects of visual representation help to constitute the political imagination of these postcolonial nations.