Rethinking the “Arts of the Contact Zone” after thirty years: Korea between the Cold War and decolonization

Thirty years ago, Mary Louise Pratt, in her 1991 MLA lecture “The Arts of the Contact Zone” and her book Imperial Eyes (1992), coined and introduced the concept of the “contact zone.” Described as spaces where “cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (1991, 34), the concept continues to have relevance today. Although Pratt’s work focuses on eighteenth-century transculturation between Europe and its colonies through travel writing, the application of linguistic origins of “contact” and the ideological implications in using “colonial frontiers” as synonymous with contact zone widens the scope of the concept’s application beyond critiques of European colonial encounters. Indeed, the concept of the contact zone has been adopted by numerous scholars across disciplinary, linguistic, and national boundaries.

Although Pratt’s term has achieved wide currency, the primary question it raises—how to theorize the dynamics of “contact” between cultures—has been heavily debated and has yet to be resolved. Ania Loomba et al. (2005), the editors of Postcolonialism and Beyond, implicitly critique Pratt’s postcolonial and anticolonial concept, explaining that their use of the preposition “beyond” is not about the complete methodological and theoretical transformation of colonial and postcolonial studies. Instead, it is about “renewing engagements with analytical models developed by older anticolonial thinkers [and] positing new forms of critique that will address the ideological and material dimensions of contemporary neo-imperialism” (4). As with the contributors of Postcolonialism and Beyond, the scholars of this special issue also probe how postcolonialism and concepts such as the contact zone continue to be important in analyzing the changed world that we live in today, which is marked by new kinds of globalizing impulses and understanding.

This special issue commemorates the enduring concept and explores its applicability and relevance, more specifically in Korea’s historical, cultural, literary, and media productions in the context of Korea’s entanglements within the Cold War geopolitical formations and the still ongoing process of decolonization, especially with its neighbors and allies. How can the concept of the contact zone help us to further address issues related to Inter (Intra)-Asian frontiers, borderlands, and cultural clashes? How might the specificities of Korea and its neighbors inform and build on the existing concept of the contact zone? Simultaneously, how might the case of Korea complicate and further problematize Pratt’s concept, thus opening up the study of both contacts and borders in novel directions? For us, border studies closely parallel Pratt’s contact zone in that the object of study is no longer limited to physical or geographical borders or state-defined territories, but contact zones encompass cultural, social, and artistic borders just as much. Therefore, the nexus between geopolitical, social, and symbolic borders points to how borders are formed and how contact zones become lived spaces. The contact zone, as we define it in this project, includes not only the physical conditions of human behavior but also social stages where various cultures and values ⁣⁣compete and resonate with one another. It is a site where ambivalent encounters occur, and co-constitutive zones produce transformative effects.

Based on this awareness, the essays presented in this issue explore various contact zones within, away, and in-between Korea and its neighbors toward thinking about the idea of “reconciliation and co-existence” within and beyond the Korean peninsula. By reconciliation and co-existence, the contributors do not aim for utopian completeness or facile visions of a borderless world. Instead, we seek to probe how working with contact zones as an analytical tool can enliven methodological directions and widen the geographical scope. The essays in the issue, therefore, focus on the events and texts of the mid-twentieth century 1940s-1960s as well as the imaginaries of this period that still inform contemporary Korean history, politics, and culture. In this way, we scrutinize art forms and their relations to the materialities of border formations.

The four research papers, one travel essay, and one visual essay in this issue focus on multiple aspects of contact zones’ possibilities and limitations, including but not limited to the contact zones as alternative spaces of belonging, places of witnessing, natural-cultural borderlands, transcultural zones, frontiers of discovery and discrimination, and as spaces of negotiations—to investigate the locations, terms, affects, and conditions where humans, ideas, and experiences meet and clash. By rethinking and interrogating the analytical power of the arts of the contact zone, the authors present a new humanistic model of criticism that will help enhance mutual understanding and ease tensions within our civil and global societies. Although we locate our objects of inquiry within South Korea, we take up the concept of the contact zone to decenter and critique the nation-state model. Therefore, this special issue aims to underscore the relevance of Korea to the study of Inter-Asia, on the one hand, and on the other to examine how to position Inter-Korean border studies, the Cold War, and decolonization processes so as to not simply reproduce the structures of center–periphery, division-reunification, etc. binaries which dominate in traditional, nation-focused scholarship.

Resonating with Pratt’s study, we begin with Suh Kyung-sik’s travel essay/writing, reflecting upon his first border crossing from Japan to South Korea in 1966 and the subsequent fifty-plus years of travel worldwide. Suh’s life experiences inform his essay. As a second-generation overseas Korean in Japan and his activist work catalyzed by his two older siblings’ arrest by the South Korean government in 1971 while they were studying abroad at Seoul National University for their suspected spy activities and violating the National Security Law, his travels force him to question the history of belonging. Like Pratt’s study of colonial travel writings, Suh’s travels to places such as the Korean DMZ, Basque, Berlin, and Palestine highlight uneven encounters. However, unlike Pratt’s “imperial eyes,” Suh’s reflections are squarely written from subaltern eyes/I that feature the precarity of crossing both material and ontological borders. Interweaved with his original poetry and readings of literature and art, Suh’s travel essay bears witness to the historical memories at the contact zones while simultaneously confronting identity, nationhood, and national borders that have become even more strongly erected even as efforts for the decolonization process continue.

Next, Yeonjung Cho interrogates the contact zone between Russia and North Korea through the mid-century publication of the journal Joseon-Soviet Culture and, more specifically, through the poet Baek Seok’s translations that appear in them. In taking up Baek’s Russian-Korean translation works, Cho asks about the liminal space between translating foreign literary works into one’s native language at a time when the North Korean state and the ruling Communist Party banned Baek’s creative poetry. How does the triangulated relationship between the two Koreas and Soviet Union overlap with the act of translation that requires reading, translating, and listening. On the one hand, these translations provide crucial insights into the kinds of Soviet literature introduced to North Korea in the earlier years of its establishment. On the other hand, Cho cautiously suggests that the translated poetry echoes the tone and style of Baek’s own creative works, thus further suggesting that translation could have been a way for Baek to satisfy his literary longing, or more precisely longing to write his own poetry. A parallel critique that Cho puts forth concerns the rather late discovery of Baek’s translation activities in South Korea. Despite the 1987 liberalization that made North Korean writers and literature accessible in South Korea, the case of Baek Seok is concrete evidence of ongoing Cold War politics that delayed the formation of North and South Korean literary contact zones.

Taeyoung Oh examines the multiple layers of contact zones created in the making of Seoul by analyzing works by some of the most influential authors of modern Korean literature. He argues that rather than the capital city as a center of a nation-state, literary representations broke away to construct Seoul as a cultural contact zone. If Seoul was constructed as a dual-city by the Japanese colonial government, then in the liberation period, Seoul was an ideological battleground in which the US-led anti-communist camp eventually prevailed. Oh demonstrates that while Seoul was politically conservative on the surface, Korean fiction produced Seoul as a space where transculturations of Japanese colonial culture, American military occupation, and the ideological schism between North and South Korea were actively played out and negotiated. In this way, Korean literary history that Oh narrates allows readers to get a glimpse of Seoul as an excavation site that has multiple sediments built onto it.

Yeonjung Cho and Taeyoung Oh evoke contact zones that are formed in multiple directions and sedimented with layers of discursive productions. In this way, they go beyond Pratt’s conceptualization of contact zones to read the intricacies of the negotiations between cultures, texts, and politics. If the previous two essays deal with linguistic and cultural translations of Korean literature to further the understanding of the contact zone, then the following two essays turn to documentary and feature film representations to mark how visuality and moving images magnify the work of the contact zones.

Woohyung Chon provides a critical reading of two contemporary documentary films. The first is The Children Gone to Poland (2018), a little-known story of North Korean orphans sent to Poland in 1953 and repatriated in 1959. The second film, Shadow Flowers (2019), depicts a North Korean defector’s recent struggles to return home from South Korea. By juxtaposing these films, Chon shows that the fates of the war orphans and contemporary defectors are not dissimilar in that they were both met with indifference and hostility from both states. These films, in fact, amplify Suh Kyungsik’s sense of precarity that he deftly writes about in his essay. At the same time, according to Chon, both films engage in techniques of unearthing memories of forgotten histories through the documentary media, which in turn constructs new cultural memories. He shows how the films redefine the inter-Korea border as contact zones for co-existence rather than separation. His analysis, therefore, opens up new ways to think about the history of the Korean DMZ and intervenes in constructing a new field of inter-Korean media and film studies that reimagines borders as sites of dialog.

In the last research article, Yongku Cha compares propaganda films of colonial Korea and Nazi Germany to interrogate the ways films reconstruct national identities. Although this is not a new argument, Cha’s comparative analysis upends the entrenched nationalist narratives that often disregard the gray zones to unveil striking affective strategies used in both colonial Korean and Nazi Germany’s propaganda films. This essay shows that propaganda film productions and policies do not lend to neat delineation between victims and aggressors. The standard interpretation that colonial Korea suffered significant trauma is problematized through Cha's reading of two colonial Korean films, Tuition (1940) and Homeless Angels (1941), which promoted transcolonial nationhood. Nazi Germany’s Eternal Forest (1936) and The Eternal Jew (1940), on the other hand, reached back to Germany’s medieval past in order to bolster racial purity and ethnic exclusions in the modern era. Despite these divergences, they both reveal the extent to which films were used for nationalist purposes through decontextualization and invention of history. Applying contact zones as a framework in analyzing the two country’s propaganda films, Cha unveils how both colonial Korea’s and Nazi Germany’s propaganda films produced similar effects of nationalism and exclusion.

We conclude the special issue with a visual essay by Chang Jae Lee, a senior book designer at Columbia University Press. Lee presents some of his most representative works to reconsider the book and book cover design in the twenty-first century. If the concept of “contact zone” can be expanded beyond the linguistic and anthropological arena and to the book covers—a microcosm within the confines of 6 by 9 in.—then book covers are integral contact zones where words and images clash and grapple. Lee shows how the successful cover communicates the book’s contents in a visual and, at the same time, a visceral language, by focusing on and negotiating with the text and context of the book. In such cases, his designs demonstrate the possibilities of what can be expressed within the outside borders of the book and its contact with the book’s content, akin to the art of translation and transculturation.

The contributors to this special issue are humanists with training in literature, film, media, and history interested in thinking through how a “contact zone” can open up and shift perspectives on Korean art forms, which can produce critical visions of the geopolitical realities in understanding our past, interpreting our present, and working toward decolonization of our future. In the last stages of producing this special issue, we were extremely saddened by Suh Kyung-sik’s (1951–2023) sudden passing on December 18, 2023. His writings and activities on diaspora politics and aesthetics have inspired all of us working on this issue. We are honored to include his essay here and hope that we can celebrate his life and work through this publication.

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Notes on contributors

Jina E. Kim

Jina E. Kim is an Associate Professor of Korean Literature and Culture at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan, a comparative study of modernist literature and culture emerging in Seoul and Taipei during the Japanese colonial era; She has recently completed her second book manuscript Sonic Contact Zones: Intermedial Aesthetics in Early Twentieth Century Korean Auditory Texts. Her current research project is on contemporary global Korean literature and transpacific studies which probes the literary and cultural productions between Korea and global Korean diasporic cultures.