LEE, SEUNG-HEE
| 2024, (83)
| pp.69~119
| number of Cited : 0
Although censorship of translated plays is briefly strengthened during the time of emergency measures, the degree is not very serious compared to the pressure exerted on creative plays at the time. On the one hand, it is focused on blocking the proximity to Korean reality while allowing a foreign trend, and on the other hand, putting a bridle in the decadent wind in the name of preserving social discipline and ethics. In fact, there is not a high probability that a translation play will violate ideological censorship. The change in this pattern came as we entered the Fifth Republic. Generous to customs, but very clear motives work for ideas. The three plays rejected by ideological censorship call out a moment related to the history far from Korea, especially the history of revolution, and connect with the reality of this place where political discourse is underground. Free City brings Northern Ireland's 'Bloody Sunday' in 1972, July 14, 1793 brings the French Revolution, and People of Justice brings Russia’s 1905 revolution. The original scene, which is the source of the rejection, is the Gwangju massacre, the original sin of the Chun Doo-hwan administration. Free City reveals this very transparently. The translator appropriates Derry’s 'Blood Sunday' as Gwangju’s 'Blood Sunday' and Northern Ireland’s civil rights movement as South Korea’s human rights movement, and the censorship power notices that this transnational imagination is reaching the Gwangju Massacre. Since then, the other two are also subject to concealment as echoes representing the ideas and practices of the transformation caused by the violence. Although it is an absent existence, its imagination is actually intended to breathe with the spirit of the times as a political discourse that cannot be openly uttered on a official approved stage, especially in creative plays. However, it is also clear that ideological censorship has eroded another value of these translated plays. Its themes, 'freedom', 'human rights', 'revolution', and 'justice', are not political slogans. These ideological values not only question and redefine the language of domination that has been occupied by the military regime, but also seek the discovery of a resistant but reflective subject. It’s an important question in an era of suffocating politics, but when it’s easy to skip it, art can leave that very space open. It is this possibility that censorship powers have blocked. Ideological censorship closes the public debate of thought, blocking the dialectical possibility of time. Nevertheless, the dangerous transnational imagination needs to be restored in that it is a history of preserving ideological values in response to dictatorships.