Seoul and the time in motion: urban form and political consciousness

Abstract

This paper explores the political effects of the cognitive change in the visual environment of colonial Seoul. It asks how the new urban imagery was perceived by the Korean population. It analyzes the ways in which they experienced urban forms, techniques of advertisement and urban infrastructure such as street‐cars and trains. It argues that the engagement of people with mobility, urban symbols and spectacles in the colonial city had stimulated different ways of seeing and thinking about who they were and what they had become, a new collective identity that is neither a subject of the Chos[obreve]n dynasty nor the Japanese colonial state. This paper demonstrates that colonial Seoul represented not only the technique of Japanese colonial subjugation but also generated a new grammar for imagining new identity and difference. The urban environment of the colonial city reflects not entirely a strategy of the colonizer but a tactic of the colonized in appropriating the different meanings of new social life, which was brought by, but not exclusively under, the control of colonial space and time.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.