TY  - JOUR
T1  - Colonial Horrors: The Starving Ghost in Colonial Korean Mass Culture
AU  - Chung, Kimberly 
JO  - Academia Koreana
PY  - 2014
DA  - 2014/1/1
DO  - 10.18399/acta.2014.17.1.004
KW  - agwi
KW  - starving ghost
KW  - poverty
KW  - colonial period
KW  - mass culture
AB  - This article addresses image and narrative production during 1920s and 1930s colonial Korea. This question encompasses the symbolic order at the intersection of antiquity and the modern; in other words, image culture under emergent print capitalism and the changing constellation of representations in a new social symbolic. Specifically, I will address this new image culture through the rematerialization and repackaging of the agwi (the starving ghost) in mass-centered images and narratives: specifically, reader-submitted cartoons (tokchamanhwa), reportage and colonial literary representations of the starving ghost. An apparition called forth in representations of poverty and starvation, the starving ghost captures the material realities of the Korean lower classes.