Embedded Voices In Between Empires The Cultural Formation of Korean Popular Music in Modern Times

This dissertation examines the historical trajectory of colonial mentality and the genealogy of cultural modernity and Americanization in South Korea by recontextualizing popular music as a narrative of collective memories and mass trauma. By mapping out two continual colonial histories, those represented by the periods of the Japanese Empire and of the American military government, I develop a narrative of Korean popular music that echoes this submission experienced by Koreans, a movement empowered by modern western technology such as the gramophone, radio and phonograph records as well as by the appropriation of various foreign popular music genres.;Thus, this research raises a set of questions concerning, first, the embedding of Japanese colonialism within Korean popular songs, and secondly, the means by which Americanization and modern life circulated within the colonial and postcolonial discourses in Korean popular song. By addressing new technologies, colonial and postcolonial debates on popular songs, and the audience's reception of popular songs, I will discuss the ambivalence of Korean subjectivity in the years of Japanese colonial occupation, the Korean War and the American military stationing, the ambivalence of a people eager to experience modern life and who tried to erase the boundaries between a burdensome pre-modern history, one that doubly divided Korean mentality by making distinctions between the inner and the outer, the 'us' and our other. Meanwhile, colonial Koreans also tried to be free from dominant transcendental ideologies and traditional conventions such as neo-Confucianism and patriarchy, while self-censoring against indoctrination by Japanese imperialism. These contradictory interactions between the Japanese Empire and colonial subjectivity were counteracted by an unexpected western influence through local accommodations of western and American cultural influxes as offshoots of modernity. Therefore, I will expand on the persistence of this embedded colonial submission in Korean popular song narratives from the introduction of the American military government in 1945 through the end of the Korean Wars in the 1950s.;Popular music may be seen as offering narratives that reveal the fascination and revulsion in response to colonial modernity. As such, popular music offers us a means to develop alternative ideas regarding the formation of cultural modernity in the periphery. The discourse on popular music in Korea serves not only as an ambivalent epistemology for Koreans positioned in the distinction between colonizers and colonized, but also represents the collective memory of different empires, the contradictory sentiments of colonial modernity and the idea of Americanization in the periphery. Considering the influential role of popular culture in contemporary East Asian circumstances, this dissertation offers greater conceptual and methodological fluidity.;This research primarily explores the ways in which consumption and production practices of Korean popular music were intertwined with structures of Korean cultural modernity. By examining socio-historical transformations such as urban development, commercialization and modernization, I examine the colonial experiences of Koreans as manifest in popular music narratives that gradually embraced collective sentiments and mass perceptions of everyday life under colonial circumstances, particularly as these were influenced by burgeoning concepts of western and American modernity and represented in song lyrics and musical performances from within the interior of Japanese colonial surveillance. As I shall argue, the submissive colonial narrative in Korean popular songs was enforced by the mobilization of Japanese militarism and imperial discourses concerned with "becoming an imperial subject" within the imperial national body, such that the colonial narrative was present continuously from the post-liberation era until the 1950s when the U.S. military controlled Korean society.