Postcards, Place, and Progress: Colonial Korea as a Touristic Commodity
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2024
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Abstract
Seeing acts as a person’s grounding mechanism for determining what they know about the world around them. This thesis asserts the importance of visual sources to analyze empire maintenance in Korea during the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945), highlighting the specific utility of the postcard. Postcards are materially representative of mobility across space; they are sent from one geographical area to another to impart on the receiver the experience of the sender’s movement. Postcards also represent temporal mobility; it takes real time for a postcard to be sent and received. In its reception, there is the understanding that it is symbolic of the past, and simultaneously representative of future mobility aspirations. This thesis argues that postcards of colonial-era Korea are a form of ‘colonial kitsch’: an emphasized cultural commodity that played into Japanese nostalgic desires for Korean tradition. Objects of colonial kitsch located a sense of Korean culture in the past, mediating how notions of Korean tradition were communicated through mass culture. As a visual historical medium representative of spatial mobility across the Japanese empire, examining postcards allows one to investigate the conflicts within the notion of imperial nostalgia and the commodification of Korean tradition during the colonial period. Multiple layers of consciousness are inherent in visual historical sources and their continued circulation and reproduction. Thus, the complex interactions of Japanese imperialism with tourism and commercialism can be decoded through an analysis of postcards. These discussions further allow for an exploration into the notion of place in history, elucidating how place can inform theories of imagined geographies and become intertwined with historical commercialism, as well as mobility and movement.
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Asian studies, Asian history, colonialism, Japan, Korea, postcard, spatial theory, tourism
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79 pages
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