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Travel Writing and Making Modern Korea-A Yellow Politician in the West, Focusing on Heo Heon’s An Around The World Travelogue

  • Journal of Humanities
  • 2010, (46), pp.5-42
  • Publisher : Institute for Humanities
  • Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
  • Received : July 25, 2010
  • Accepted : August 20, 2010

HWANG, HODUK 1

1성균관대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

This article examines cultural meanings of the travel done by colonist, Heo Heon(許憲) from May 20, 1926 to May 10, 1927. Heo Heon’s travel does not have a frame of either orientalism or occidentalism; rather, it places a heavy emphasis on the people of a small and weak power, political sympathy and solidarity among nations of (anti)colonies, or the exchange of political programs. In other words, it was not the knowledge of hierarchical world such as a superior representation of western civilization or the discovery of the other that Heo was going to pursue. It was the travel that linked the points of possible solidarity-parties like newly-rise independent states, small countries but with a power and labor parties within an empire. Heo’s travel was not the records of admiration for such development of western cities, but the accumulation of mind concerning international solidarity and sympathy among oppressed nations. Heo Heon’s An Around The World Travelogue, serialized in 『Samcheonli(三千里)』 ever since the popular magazine had launched, highlighted the issue of ‘event’ not the matter of representation as an important descriptive target in the itinerary. Especially, Heo’s travel reveals the contemporary problems with the expression of ‘impossibility of representation’; for example, crucial matters such as ‘socialism’ and ‘independence of nation’ were described with expressions ‘the Soviet union unable to write’ and ‘the events of unspeakable’ respectively. The itinerary showing the territory of the (im)possibility of representation was the calling of a different geopolitics, and also the disclosure of crippled-political features of those days. Heo’s An Around The World Travelogue, largely published through a popular magazine was the record of the most influential person of politics. Therefore, it is not too much to say that the itinerary would play a pivotal role in the transition of contemporary society. Moreover, Heo’s issue rose by evoking the international political matter of solidarity as a geopolitical problem, conquering the conservative formular like the western for enlightenment or un-representable cultivated progress. Heo Heon’s travel would submit a claim for geopolitics of solidarity which is distinguished from geographics of imperialism.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.