Collaboration, Coproduction, and Code-Switching: Colonial Cinema and Postcolonial Archaeology

This article reassesses the issue of colonial collaboration in the Japanese empire by examining the rise of cinematic coproductions between Japanese and Korean filmmakers. By the late 1930s, colonial Korea’s filmmaking industry had been fully subsumed into the Japanese film industry, and regulations were established that required all films to assimilate imperial policies. The colonial government’s active promotion of colonial “collaboration” and “coproduction” between the colonizers and the colonized ideologically worked to obfuscate these increasing restrictions in colonial film productions while producing complex and contentious desires across the colonial divide. The very concepts of “collaboration” and “coproduction” need to be redefined in light of increasingly complex imperial hierarchies and entanglements. Taking the concept of “code-switching” beyond its linguistic origins, this article argues that we must reassess texts of colonial collaboration and coproduction produced at a time when Korean film had to “code-switch” into Japanese—to linguistically, culturally, and politically align itself with the wartime empire. The article argues that recently excavated films from colonial and Cold War archives, such as Spring in the Korean Peninsula, offer a rare glimpse into repressed and contested histories and raise the broader conundrum of accessing and assessing uneasily commingled colonial pasts of Asian-Pacific nations in the ruins of postcolonial aftermath. Scroll down for film clips referenced in this article.  All clips are from the DVD Spring in the Korean Peninsula made by the Korean Film Archive (KOFA) in 2007. Seoul: Teawŏn Entertainment, Ltd. Used here  with the permission of the KOFA. Clip 1: Spring in the Korean Peninsula opening sequence (0:00-4:35) Clip 2: The film within a film: Ch’un-hyang as a spectacle of colonial kitsch (36:30-43:44) Clip 3: Boardroom scene: corporatization of the colonial film industry (1:03:00-1:06:10

Object Control in Korean: How Many Constructions?

Korean seltukhata ‘persuade’ and similar predicates that take a propositional complement (marked with -tolok) license three object control constructions: 1) accusative persuadee in the matrix clause precedes the embedded clause (ACC1); 2) accusative persuadee follows the embedded clause (ACC2); 3) persuadee in the nominative case appears in the embedded clause (NOM). Prior accounts treated these constructions as derivationally related, arguing either for semantic or syntactic analysis of control. Using primary data and processing results, we argue that ACC1 and ACC2 are structurally distinct, the former instantiating obligatory control, the latter, non-obligatory control. Additionally, we provide evidence that NOM may be an instance of non-obligatory control.Linguistic

Collaboration, Coproduction, and Code-Switching: Colonial Cinema and Postcolonial Archaeology

Abstract This article reassesses the issue of colonial collaboration in the Japanese empire by examining the rise of cinematic coproductions between Japanese and Korean filmmakers. By the late 1930s, colonial Korea's filmmaking industry had been fully subsumed into the Japanese film industry, and regulations were established that required all films to assimilate imperial policies. The colonial government's active promotion of colonial "collaboration" and "coproduction" between the colonizers and the colonized ideologically worked to obfuscate these increasing restrictions in colonial film productions while producing complex and contentious desires across the colonial divide. The very concepts of "collaboration" and "coproduction" need to be redefined in light of increasingly complex imperial hierarchies and entanglements. Taking the concept of "codeswitching" beyond its linguistic origins, this article argues that we must reassess texts of colonial collaboration and coproduction produced at a time when Korean film had to "code-switch" into Japanese-to linguistically, culturally, and politically align itself with the wartime empire. The article argues that recently excavated films from colonial and Cold War archives, such as Spring in the Korean Peninsula, offer a rare glimpse into repressed and contested histories and raise the broader conundrum of accessing and assessing uneasily commingled colonial pasts of AsianPacific nations in the ruins of postcolonial aftermath. This article is an inquiry into the controversial issue of colonial collaboration between Korea and Japan, and the concomitant postcolonial conundrum of accessing and assessing colonial pasts in the Asian-Pacific region. Within structural continuities from the colonial to the postcolonial eras, the region is still haunted by political impasses more than half a century after the abrupt dissolution of the Japanese empire in 1945. 1 The case of recently discovered transcolonial films from the former Japanese empire offers us a productive site of entry from which to consider these still hotly contested issues. Long lost in the dusty vaults of colonial and Cold War archive

Subject/object processing asymmetries in Korean relative clauses: Evidence from ERP data

Subject relative (SR) clauses have a reliable processing advantage in VO languages like English in which relative clauses (RCs) follow the head noun. The question is whether this is also routinely true in OV languages like Japanese and Korean, in which RCs precede the head noun. We conducted an event-related brain potential (ERP) study of Korean RCs to test whether the SR advantage manifests in brain responses, and to tease apart the typological factors that might contribute to these responses. Our results suggest that brain responses to RCs are remarkably similar in VO and OV languages. Our results also suggest that the marking of the right edge of the RC in Chinese (Yang et al. 2010) and Korean and the absence of such marking in Japanese (Ueno & Garnsey 2008) affect the response to the following head noun. The consistent SR advantage found in ERP studies lends further support to a universal subject preference in the processing of relative clauses.Linguistic