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The Colonial Korean, Native Diaspora, and his Death - A study of Kim Nam-Cheon’s “A Beautiful Story(美談)”

Jinhyoung Lee 1

1건국대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the changes of agricultural community and the native’s response to the changes in the colonial Korea, and the internal ruptures in Japanese imperialism by reading of Kim Nam-Cheon’s short story “A Beautiful Story(美談)” with a focus on the concept of “diaspora”. Kim Nam-Cheon’s short story concerns the diasporization of a colonial Korean peasant, and his ensuing death. Park Wal-Soo -a tenant farmer- becomes the hero of “a beautiful story” due to his diligence. He choices to become a wage-labourer when his agricultural village is reorganized due to Japanese gold mining and rural development policies. His choice induces the potentialization of his diasporic emotions which in turn lead to his excessive actions and ultimate death (a mark of his failure to negotiate his identity). The excessive actions and death of the native diaspora serve to demonstrate both the violence of Japanese colonial control and his double “diasporic intervention” in the modernized=colonized world. First, his excessive actions can be considered attempts to recover a lost home (even though it may be in an imaginative way). and second, the character’s death can be perceived as the implosion of the wage-labourer and the modernized=colonized world both. This paper’s emamination of the concept of diaspora and diasporic emotion sheds light on the existence of the modern colonial subject (dislocation), and the rupturability of the imperialist systems within which the native diaspora lives. This point may be the scandal of imperialism, which is hard to capture in terms of national antagonisms or control/resistance.

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