This chapter investigates ways that recent South Korean cultural products recreate or even fantasize historical traumas. By focusing on a musical theatre production (The Last Empress), a music video (The Lost Empire), and a film (Hanbando) that all feature a historical female icon, Empress Myoungsung, I examine how cultural texts inculcate anti-Japanese sentiment by juxtaposing a single, century-old incident (the night of Queen Min’s assassination) onto contemporary South Korean social contexts. In an attempt to appeal to public sentiment, the three texts variously re-enact the historical trauma and adopt it as a crucial visual ingredient. Here, I question how producers inflict the Korean trauma upon the image of Queen Min on-screen by conflating this century-old tragedy with current situations and transforming the figure of Queen Min into an undying “spirit”-a nationalistic icon who promises the nation’s bright future in the global era. I also demonstrate how the workings of visualization in these texts posit the Empress and her significance within ambivalent frameworks (i.e. between “tradition”/“modern” and “national”/“global desire”), and how such positioning manipulates her significance in order to fulfill Korea’s desire for global visibility and success.
CITATION STYLE
Lee, H. (2018). The female body as the site of historical controversy: Ghostly reappearance in South Korean historical fiction. In Asia and the Historical Imagination (pp. 109–126). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7401-1_6
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