Jin-kyung Lee

Coloniality Nationalism race culture bio-politics

This article locates a critical historical shift in modern subject formation in the intellectual discourses from the incipient stage of the Culture Movement between 1914 and 1922. I argue that re-inscribing the nineteenth century modern European discourses on bio-politics, aesthetics, and cultural racism in the context of anti-colonial nationalism, the nationalist reformist discourses of this period produced the colonial-modern subject that is vitalistic, voluntaristic and sovereign in the delimited sphere of culture and aesthetics. The article also demonstrates that this spiritually and aesthetically sovereign subjectivity is simultaneously imbricated with the Korean nationalists’ adaptation of what Foucault defines as “governmentality,” bio-political discipline of the population, to their program of national strengthening and anti-colonial resistance. The first section of the article discusses how the nationalist discourses translated biological and material vitalism, available from Social Darwinism and liberal ideology, into a spiritual brand of vitalism and voluntarism. The second section deals with the convergence between the ideas of sovereignty of self and aesthetics on the one hand and the role of aesthetics as ethnonationalizing and hegemonizing interpellation on the other. The third section examines how the discourse of cultural racism of modern European origin was joined to the conceptions of the sovereign aesthetic subjectivity and bio-political disciplining of the population by focusing on Yi Kwang-su’s writings. Yi Kwang-su couples the need for modern bio-political disciplining of Koreans with moral and cultural reforms that must take place through the construction of a voluntaristic, autonomous self, which, in turn, can occur only through the education of emotion in the sphere of literature, aesthetics and culture. This reform of sentiment, morality, and behaviors is, for Yi, necessarily a program of racial improvement or racial rehabilitation. The specifically colonial characteristic of Yi Kwang-su’s nationalist program that combines these three types of discourses, spiritual vitalism, Romantic notions of self and art and racial rehabilitation, lies in its culturalism. Cultural(-ized) nationalism, on the one hand, silently assists the material bio-political projects of the colonial state, awaiting to metamorphose into the sovereign agent of their implementation in the political sphere in the post-colonial nation-state.