Artist as Producer and Kitsch: The Ethnographic Turn and the Colonial Collection

Date
Mon October 28th 2013, 12:00 - 1:30pm
Event Sponsor
Center for East Asian Studies, Korean Studies Program, Shorenstein APARC, The William J. Perry Professorship Fund
Location
521 Memorial Way, Knight Building, Room 102
Artist as Producer and Kitsch: The Ethnographic Turn and the Colonial Collection
Speaker:

Aimee Kwon, Assistant Professor of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University 

In the 1930s, with Japan’s expansions into the Asian continent, colonial Korean culture in general, and literature in particular, came to take important roles as both subject and object of such imperial expansions. This paper reexamines the colonizer and colonized binary by re-contextualizing the rise of translated texts packaged as ethnographic “colonial collections.” In particular, this paper historicizes the ethnographic turn relegated to colonial culture by examining the rise of colonial collections as a manifestation of mass-produced objects of colonial kitsch at this time. The complex position of the colonial artist/writer cum (self-)ethnographer situated in between the colony and the metropole embodies an uncanny contact zone as the artist and work of art become reified as objects of imperial consumer fetishism. In the colonial encounter, the artist as producer and the art object of his or her labor meld into indistinguishable and interchangeable forms, as producer and product of kitsch. In such relations of colonial alienation, cultural producers struggled to map out spaces as agents of artistic expression, while agency for the colonized artist often meant further alienation through self-ethnography or through mimicry of the colonizer’s racialized forms and discourses.

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