Cold War Cosmopolitanism: Period Style in 1950s Korean Cinema by Christina Klein (review)

Abstract

what Choi has termed Protestant modernity be inextricable from the history of American empire? One could note that the approaches of these Protestant missionaries are deeply colonial in their fixation with managing the gendered other—in this case, native Korean women. More attention to how the nexus of the colonizer and the colonized haunts the dynamics of organized religion—even if used as a means for native women’s self-actualization—could add to the impressive contributions this book makes. Gender Politics shares critical sensibilities with a robust body of postcolonial and feminist work that examines how native subjects negotiate their own ambiguous agencies under empire and theorizes womanhood from a non-West-centric feminist perspective. Works with similar interventions include Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s Scattered Hegemonies (1994), Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety (2011), and Sungyun Lim’s Rules of the House (2018). The book is also in conversation with Korean cultural studies on New Women such as Ji-Eun Lee’s Women Pre-Scripted (2015) and Sunyoung Park’s The Proletarian Wave (2015). In addition, Gender Politics joins a dialogue generated by scholars who have been pushing the boundaries of what constitutes Koreanness beyond an ethnonational understanding. These scholars include David S. Roh, who examines connections between Zainichi and Korean American literatures in Minor Transpacific (2021), and Yoon Sun Yang, who in From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men (2017) explores how individuality was translated into Korean in the form of the early colonial domestic novel inflected by Japanese and Chinese literary traditions. Choi’s Gender Politics will be useful not only for specialists of colonial-era Korea but also for postcolonial and feminist scholars working in a variety of transnational cultural contexts.