Seoul, conditions of possibility, and the postnational hyperspace

Abstract

Korean 'official nationalism' (as Anderson calls it) arose late, in a context of partition and its inevitable ambiguities, Confucian self-discipline but wildly violent politics, rapid economic growth, and then Korea's pivotal role in the electronics and e-economy booms of the 1980s and 1990s. Seoul had to be constructed as the national capital in the absence of continuity in its represented past, consequent on the attempted total obliteration of Korean identity by the Japanese colonialist regime and subsequent wartime destruction. Its 'monuments' are virtually empty of cultural referencing; even the National Assembly is a 'painted shed'; new cultural production is overwhelmingly either pasti..