The American struggle for Korean minds: United States cultural policy and occupied Korea

Most scholarly investigations on the U.S. occupation of South Korea have focused on the economic and political aspects of it, leaving the cultural side of story mostly untold. This dissertation attempts to convey a comprehensive picture of the time by adding a cultural dimension to our understanding of the period. By treating cultural practice as a process of production, it tries to understand U.S. cultural maneuvering in the broad context of the political economy of Korea, and to conceive U.S. cultural policy as an arena of hegemonic struggle profoundly intersected by various dimensions such as history, value, national identity, and so on.; This study argues that America's cultural maneuvering in Korea can be understood only in the context of America's global cultural scheme in support of its postwar hegemony. It claims that Americans have consistently made culture a central aspect of their overseas operations, in close harmony with the U.S. foreign policy. America's cultural offensive on Korean people was an extension of this process, in which they sought to define themselves by creating historical myths, propagating values, of the United States.; Links between imperial politics and cultural practices are blatantly apparent in America's dealing with Korean press. Although Americans kept trumpeting a free press as a principle in its press policy, this study suggests that the concept of free press in Korea was not viable even at the beginning, given the ideological incongruities between American expectations and the progressive Korean press. U.S. interventionist policy completely contradicted the tenets of the free press in American liberal tradition.; It was a period that constructed a whole set of patterns and inventories of popular culture that established the subsequent structure of cultural relations between Korea and the United States. This period represents the first significant involvement of American cultural industries in Korean culture, but it coincided with systematic discouragement of nationalist cultural activities. This study suggests that the constellation of a strong cultural policy successfully executed by the United States, and of a glorified fantasy delivered by American culture, opened a path to the subsequently successful process of Americanization in Korea.