Chung-kang Kim

I am a Ph.D candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. In 1998 graduated from Yonsei University majoring Korean modern history. I have always loved Korean ‘cultures’ including literature, plays, and dramas. My variety of interests in Korean culture led me to learn more about Korean society from an interdisciplinary perspective during my first two years of graduate study in EALC. Most significantly, when I first encountered old Korean films in Nancy Abelmann’s class, I was fascinated by those films themselves and the ways in which a film could be a great window on a nation’s history. I am currently writing my dissertation provisionally entitled “Co-operated Nation: The Politics and Desire of Popular Cinema in Authoritarian South Korean (1953-1972).” This dissertation examines the comedy genre formation in the course of historical events, industrial transition, government policy, and various modes of performance such as akkuk, plays, radio drama, and Hollywood and Japanese film. I argue that a commercially-oriented film genre reflects and expresses the multitude of desires of people and nations as modern subjects, which was formed and shaped, disciplined and deviated, and selected, consumed and rejected by the rules, norms, and hidden capitalistic power of everyday life overwhelmed in modern South Korean history. In the future, I hope to study more about the intimate cultural exchanges in popular film and performances from the Japanese colonial period, especially focusing on vaudeville performances (akkuk) in early modern Korea and Japan and the ‘co-production’ of films between Hong Kong and South Korea in the late 1960s.

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