scholarly journals The “Little Angels” and Nationalist Reconstruction of Traditional Performing Arts in Cold War South Korea

2019 ◽  
Vol null (40) ◽  
pp. 143-183
Author(s):  
Hee-sun Kim
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Performing Arts

Transcending the Past: Singing and the Lingering Cold War in the Korean Christian Diaspora

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
HYUN KYONG HANNAH CHANG
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Choral Music ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Identity And Agency ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract Protestant music in South Korea has received little attention in ethnomusicology despite the fact that Protestant Christianity was one of the most popular religions in twentieth-century Korea. This has meant a missed opportunity to consider the musical impact of a religious institution that mediated translocal experiences between South Korea and the United States during the Cold War period (1950s–1980s). This article explores the politics of music style in South Korean diasporic churches through an ethnography of a church choir in California. I document these singers’ preference for European-style choral music over neotraditional pieces that incorporate the aesthetics of suffering from certain Korean traditional genres. I argue that their musical judgement must be understood in the context of their lived and remembered experience of power inequalities between the United States and South Korea. Based on my interviews with the singers, I show that they understand hymns and related Euro-American genres as healing practices that helped them overcome a difficult past and hear traditional vocal music as sonic icons of Korea's sad past. The article outlines a pervasive South Korean/Korean diasporic historical consciousness that challenges easy conceptions of identity and agency in music studies.

Ideology Was A Uniform to Be Taken On and Off: An Anti-Communist Prisoner’s Survival from Manchuria to Korea to India

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 282-306
Author(s):  
Sunwoo Lee
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
United Nations ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Republic Of Korea ◽  
Prisoner Of War ◽  
Japanese Occupation ◽  
Chinese Civil War ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract Chi Ki-ch’ŏl’s story reveals a man not driven by ideology, but buffeted by it. He began adulthood as a Korean exile in Manchuria, where the Japanese occupation army conscripted him. After Japan’s defeat in August 1945, he joined a Korean contingent of the Chinese Communist Army and fought in the Chinese Civil War. His unit later repatriated to North Korea, where it joined the invasion of South Korea on 25 June 1950. When U.S.-led forces of the United Nations shattered that invasion in September, he quickly arranged to surrender to U.S. troops. While in custody, Chi worked with Republic of Korea (rok) intelligence to organize prisoner of war (pow) resistance to their being returned to North Korea after the impending armistice. He enjoyed privileges as an anti-Communist in the pow camps, and hoped it would continue. Although an active anti-Communist, Chi judged that he would not be able to live in South Korea as an ex-pow. After refusing repatriation to North Korea, he also rejected staying in South Korea. But Chi would survive elsewhere. He relocated to India, where he thrived as a businessman. He chose the space of neutrality to succeed as an anti-Communist, where life nevertheless reflected the contentious energy of the Cold War. Chi’s decision demonstrated how ideology, despite its importance to him, was not sufficient to translate his rejection of Communist North Korea into a commitment to South Korea.

Death in Philadelphia, 1958

2020 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-263
Author(s):  
Hannah Kim
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Juvenile Delinquency ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Model Minority ◽  
Foreign Student ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Korean Student ◽  
Idealized Model

In 1958, In-Ho Oh, a foreign student from South Korea, was beaten to death in West Philadelphia by a group of black youths. The brutal murder shocked people all over the nation who wrote hundreds of letters to the newspapers and the mayor about the incident. Some letter writers focused on the implications of the murder for Cold War diplomacy, while some believed there were moral lessons to be learned from the generous actions of Oh’s family. Yet other letter writers focused on race and juvenile delinquency and constructed an idealized “model” minority in the Korean student, contrasting him to the young suspects. The death of In-Ho Oh came to have different meanings to different groups and challenged America’s self-perception about racial equality and exceptionalism.

Departure and Repatriation as Cold War Dissensus: Domestic Ethnography in Korean Documentary

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 433-457
Author(s):  
Jinhee Park
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Private Realm ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Given

Abstract This article examines autobiographic documentaries about families that expose “dissensus” in the mapping of transborder migration and diasporic desire that were the results of the Cold War in North Korea, South Korea, and Japan. Jae-hee Hong (dir. My Father’s Emails) and Yong-hi Yang (dir. Dear Pyongyang and Goodbye Pyongyang) document the ongoing Cold War in their fathers’ histories through their position as a “familial other,” who embodies both dissensus and intimacy. Hong reveals that anticommunism in South Korean postwar nation building reverberated in the private realm. Yang documents her Zainichi father, who sent his sons to North Korea during the Repatriation Campaign in Japan. The anticommunist father in South Korea (Hong’s) and the communist father in Japan (Yang’s) engendered family migration with contrasting motivations, departure from and return to North Korea, respectively. Juxtaposing these two opposite ideologies in family histories, as well as juxtaposing the filmmakers’ dissonance with the given ideologies in domestic space, provide the aesthetic form for “dissensus.” The politics of aesthetics in domestic ethnography manifests in that the self and the Other are inextricably interlocked because of the reciprocity of the filmmaker and the communist or anticommunist subject.

From American Ethnographer to Cold War Icon: Charles Ives through the Eyes of Henry and Sidney Cowell

2006 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID C. PAUL
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
American Art ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
New York Public Library ◽  
Henry Cowell ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract Scholars have recognized that Henry Cowell was one of the most ardent promoters of Charles Ives, but the fact that Cowell's conception of Ives shifted over time has been overlooked. During the late twenties, Cowell portrayed Ives as a fundamentally social artist with the sensibilities of a musical ethnographer. By the fifties, in the writings Cowell coauthored with his wife Sidney, Ives came to be depicted as a paragon for the liberating power of individualism. Close scrutiny of Cowell's published writings, along with letters and manuscripts from the Henry Cowell Collection of the Music Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, reveals the factors that influenced this transition. Béla Bartók's theories about folk music authenticity were the impetus behind Cowell's earliest conception of Ives. Cowell maintained that Ives had created a definitively American art music by transcribing the performance idiosyncrasies of American folk musicians. The anxieties of the Cold War and a writing partnership with his wife caused Cowell to stress Ives's commitment to the individualism espoused by transcendentalist philosophers. The Cowells no longer equated Ives's Americanness with his ability to transcribe local practice, but instead with his solitary pursuit of the “Universal Mind.”

scholarly journals Transducing a Sermon, Inducing Conversion

2017 ◽  
Vol 137 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Harkness
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
South Korea

This paper is an analysis of the final sermon of Billy Graham’s 1973 Crusade in Seoul, South Korea, when he preached to a crowd estimated to exceed one million people. Next to Graham at the pulpit was Billy Jang Hwan Kim, a preacher who, in his capacity as interpreter, translated Graham’s sermon verbally and peri-verbally—utterance by utterance, tone by tone, gesture by gesture—for the Korean-speaking audience. I examine the dynamic pragmatics (for example, chronotopic formulations, deictic calibrations, voicing and register effects, and indexical dimensions of entextualization) by which a sermonic copy across linguistic codes became an evangelical conduit between Cold War polities. In so doing, I demonstrate how the scope of intertextual analysis can be expanded productively from the narrow translation of denotation across codes to the broader indexical processes of semiotic “transduction” across domains of cultural semiosis.

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