City of Sediments: A History of Seoul in the Age of Colonialism

This ambitious and original book forgoes familiar urban history-telling devices to ask the question, “How did colonial Seoul write its own histories?” Through three sections of two chapters each, Se-Mi Oh offers us an alternative methodology, what she calls “sedimentary history,” to read new histories in the texts she has gleaned from and through mass media in colonial Korea (15). The payoff for this methodological originality is a kaleidoscopic view, not only into urban spaces of “Seoul in the age of colonialism” but also into urban Korean society in the “liminal space” of the late 1920s; a period of growing commerce and fleeting but flourishing media growth under Japanese cultural rule. Oh’s account centers on the recuperation and analysis of several storytelling practices by the colonized. These, she argues, offer a counterpart to linear, narrative histories that could only exist inside the hegemonic discourse of Japanese imperialism as a modernizing and civilizing force. Oh also argues that these practices and the stories (iyagi) they produce should also be viewed as quotidian forms of “desistance” and defiance that “might have escaped an inquiry . . . largely concerned . . . with the question of resistance” (193)Wide-ranging in its interlocutors and cutting across several different fields in its interventions, City of Sediments has the potential to do for studies of colonial Korea what the work of Miriam Silverberg and Harry D. Harootunian achieved for the study of interwar urban Japan.1 Beyond Silverberg’s and Harootunian’s interests in urban life, mass culture, and modernity, the author brings her analytical lens to bear on how colonialism interacts with such phenomena. Moving beyond the debates over “colonial modernity” that have animated scholars of Korean history and literature for over two decades, Oh offers an alternative guiding question—“Where does the impulse to distinguish modernity in the colony from modernity in the metropole come from?” (11). As a response to the martialing of urban space toward a staging of modernity as universal, Oh’s search is for “sediments” that are not layers within linear time but copresent, heterogeneous fragments.Oh’s introduction offers us a visual representation of this “sedimentary model of history” through a cover of the monthly “leisure” magazine Pyŏlgŏn’gon (1926–34) from 1933. The image, titled “Modern Picture of the Twelve Thousand Peaks of Kŭmgang Mountain,” was a play on a genre of landscape painting (17). To the reviewer, it also evoked Brueghel the Elder’s Tower of Babel paintings. And indeed, the multisensory montage of mountain peaks covered in modern leisure spots, as well as a chapel and a “suicide spot,” is brimming over with multilingual and multiscriptal signs. The magazine Pyŏlgŏn’gon, and this cover in particular, have featured in two recent exhibitions held in Seoul. These focused on the magazine as representative of Seoul’s richly hybrid avant-garde and mass cultures that emerged despite colonial oppression, but also on the political statements made by Pyŏlgŏn’gon’s focus on alternative visions of the city to those produced by the Japanese Government-General.2 In a similar fashion, Oh’s sedimentary history is an attempt to bring “to the fore the energy that quotidian practices generated in order to unthink and unfix the grip of the visual language of colonial power” (193).City of Sediments’ chapters are structured according to the materials interpreted within; the book’s three parts focus broadly on visual, aural, and kinetic aspects of the texts under discussion. Specifically, chapters 1 and 2 look at photography, panoramas, and maps; chapters 3 and 4 at commercial signage, adverts, and gramophone recordings; and chapters 5 and 6 at “urban investigative reports” published in popular magazines.In chapter 1, Oh looks at depictions of the built environment in Seoul, starting with the Government-General Building, completed in 1925. One might wonder whether the history of this building requires further analysis, but Oh argues that “moving away from symbolic readings of architecture that reinforce the rhetoric of colonial domination” (that is, not just reading these symbols as they were designed to be read) toward a relational and embedded reading allows for the complication of colonial narratives (30). This intervention is much appreciated and compels historians of Japanese empire to ground their analyses of urban space in something more than just exegeses within the colonizers’ own symbolic frameworks. The chapter analyzes the coproduction of both “spatial distinction and temporal difference” by the interplay of symbol and surroundings in three features: the “ruin,” the architectural ornament, and the panorama (52). In each case, Oh shows how colonial power in Korea, especially in its capital city, relied on creating visions and views that interpellated colonial subjects, forming their modern subjectivity. However, colonial subjects were not simply passive within the “discursive production of colonial power,” Oh argues. The final two-thirds of this book feature compelling analyses of colonial subjects’ refusals to engage in the Japanese “visual regime.”Before we get there, however, chapter 2 takes us back in time from 1925 to 1919, and to the funeral of King Kojong. It focuses closely on visual records of Kojong’s funeral procession through Seoul, and the shift from its memorialization via ritual image to photographic souvenir. This, Oh argues, was a result of Japanese colonial control over history and memory production, via visual representations of narrative time—a continuation of themes and arguments from the first chapter. Compared to other chapters, this topic felt slightly out of place—there is little discussion of the role of urban space, despite the intriguing mention of the procession of Kojong’s two biers (one for the body of the king, and one for his spirit) breaking with tradition and traveling along two different routes through Seoul. Together, however, the chapters of part 1, “History, Event, the City,” present us with a rounded understanding of the spatial and temporal production of colonial power—through predominantly visual modes. This sets the scene for what Oh’s featured texts and authors in the following four chapters are reacting to or withdrawing from.Parts 2 and 3 of City of Sediments are where Oh’s originality in methodology and choices of source material really shine through. Part 2 of the book, “Language, Text, Play,” addresses the cacophony and chaos of capitalism in Seoul. In chapter 3, Oh takes the reader first to Chongno, the backbone of Korean commerce in Seoul, via an urban sketch from the Tonga ilbo newspaper in 1929, in which the spectacle of an old man in a topknot dexterously painting a hanja/kanji shop sign draws a crowd of onlookers. Indeed, the locale of Chongno and the figure of the “old man” feature heavily in the texts analyzed in each of the final four chapters of the book. For both Oh and contemporary Koreans—journalists and their audiences—the locale and figure act as important touchstones. Chongno, as the main thoroughfare in Hanyang for centuries prior to Korea’s colonization and as the southern limit and key commercial zone of “Korean space” in the colonial city, was both metonym and palimpsest for the Korean nation and its history—an “accumulation of time not over time” (200). Similarly, the old man represented a “time lag . . . a figure outmoded and out of place,” but also acted as a reminder of “stubborn elements that could not be absorbed into the visual regime of colonial power” (143).In chapter 3, through urban sketches and photographs of street scenes, Oh first draws our attention to commercial signage—as painted by the man with the topknot—arguing that, “layered against the cosmopolitan surface of the city, the multilingual signage with predominantly ‘Asian scripts’ created a temporally and spatially disparate sediment” (96). The cosmopolitanism here is key, for modernity in Seoul involved much more than Japanese influence, but Oh is careful in her discussion of the “modern” and “cosmopolitan” never to overlook the simultaneous presence of Japan’s colonizing efforts. The cosmopolitan in Oh’s Seoul does not privilege the West, but it does come inextricably tied to consumption: Japanese, American, and European brand names represent the incursions of global commerce that were unevenly experienced throughout the colony.Oh, in her studies of commercial street signage and print advertisements, is attempting to recover what the act of reading these cacophonous and multiscripted/multilingual assemblages felt and sounded like. What she finds here is her first example of desistance or resistance, where “in the cacophony there existed a possibility of difference” (121). In the morass of hanja/kanji, hangul, t’o, furigana, and so on, there were gaps and slippages between the written and the spoken, the indexed and the interpreted, where, as Leonard Cohen might say, “the light gets in.” For Oh, signage in Seoul exemplifies not only modern capitalism, but also the uneven terrain of a heterolingual colonial market. For Oh’s Korean subjects, in the space created by the “multiple temporalities” embedded in both trademarks and their hanja/kanji, the moment of speech allowed for the interjection of the everyday, the vernacular, the “habitual”—the “traces of copresent time” that represent Oh’s sediments (18).The following chapter continues Oh’s discussion of speech and sound that escaped colonial control, through the disembodied voice of Sin Pul Ch’ul, comic sketch (mandam) performer, emanating from a gramophone record. Sin and other mandam artists often deployed an “old man” character in their work, as a humorous commentary on the artificiality of modern life. A pioneer of the mandam genre, Sin (whose own stage name was a play on words) saw humor as the only resistance possible for Korean intellectuals, and Oh analyzes scripts of his and other mandam sketches in search of such resistance. In colonial Korea, mandam artists relied on an audience that could keep up with their wordplay across multiple languages and scripts. Oh analyzes several mandam scripts and interprets them for her readers, but the sheer complexity of the linguistic play makes this a difficult task. For readers without a solid grasp of Korean and Japanese, such sections in this and the previous chapter may be heavy going.Part 3, “Kinetic Optics, Liquid Time,” consists of two chapters exploring urban reportage found in the pages of Pyŏlgŏn’gon in the second half of the 1920s. Chapter 5 looks at the timed “missions” of Pyŏlgŏn’gon reporters, given an hour to explore the streets of Seoul around their offices, usually in the slow-moving afternoons. Chapter 6 follows reporters trailing “suspicious persons” to find content for their “nightly reports” in a mirroring—both linguistic and tactical—of colonial surveillance methods. These reports, and Oh’s analyses, bring the city to life, revealing things simultaneously superficial and hidden, mundane and bizarre. These chapters showcase not only the city but also the talents—sometimes prurient, sometimes laconic—of Pyŏlgŏn’gon journalists, and their co-creation of a new urban community along with their magazine’s readers.In chapter 5, Oh teases out the various “temporal modalities” that are presented in contrast to the narrative time she associates with Japanese constructions of history and future. In focusing on clock time, she argues, reporters highlighted the artificiality of modern life and its rhythms. In acting as eyewitnesses, their reportage of events “at the same time” reproduced the simultaneity of camera footage. And, in their capturing of liminal moments “in time,” of eventlessness between events, Oh argues, these reporters uncovered the “infraordinary.” The resulting reports were surreal montages which produced both Seoul and subject as modern. For, Oh argues, “modernity is not the condition but the method of a subject engaging with the world and producing a mode of being” (152).Chapter 6 takes place in another temporal mode—that of the “empty time” of the middle of the night, separate from the colonial and capitalist hours of surveillance and productivity. It features a different spatial aspect, too: we follow reporters off the streets of Seoul, via the route of a suspicious stranger, or the sound of merrymaking, into people’s homes. Anonymized through their disguises as students or itinerant salespeople, but also through the nature of modern city life, reporters found their way into peoples’ homes only to be confronted with copies of their own magazines and even photographs of their own faces. More than the other chapters, chapter 6 discusses just who the audience of Oh’s “texts” were and what the interplay between writer and readers looked like. To this reviewer, the conversations between strangers under the cover of darkness reported in the pages of Pyŏlgŏn’gon, and the creation of a new reading public through them, seemed like a poignant parallel for the wider colonial situation and condition of Korean subjectivity.In the book’s epilogue, “A Time of Rehearsal” (which provides a useful and streamlined recap of the book’s key arguments), Oh concludes by confronting the reader with a complex question—did colonized subjects make Seoul modern, or should we transcend such “foreclosing structures of modernity and history” (202) through the methods of sedimentary history demonstrated in this book? The paradox of Seoul’s modernity, Oh seems to be arguing, is that it was created by actions that defy the bounds of such a concept.Oh discusses her methodology in the book’s introduction and epilogue. She states how she “started with the assumption that everything is text” (193). This focus on the reading of the colonial archive as text rather than a historical source is a key feature of City of Sediments. This may account for the author’s erudite analysis of these materials in dialogue with the thoughts and concepts of a gamut of Western theorists, authors, and artists—she is interested in teasing out the cosmopolitan within the sediments she is analyzing, but less so in the cosmopolitan histories of their production. However, I would have been interested to know more about her choice to engage with a predominantly European range of theoretical interlocutors, from the more contemporaneous Benjamin and Kracauer to French writer Georges Perec and the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs.Due to the pathbreaking nature of this book and the different fields that its findings and methodologies touch upon, there will be many different audiences for City of Sediments. Historians of East Asia, especially Japan and Korea, as well as historians of colonialism beyond the region, will find much here that will inspire and provoke. The cosmopolitan breadth of Oh’s interlocutors means that all scholars with an interest in urban theory will find their way to new insights via familiar guides. The book also joins recent English-language works on literature, colonialism, and the urban by Christine Yi and Jina E. Kim.3 I can see this book being assigned on field reading lists and in graduate seminars across modern Korean history, the history of the Japanese Empire, urban culture in East Asia, and Korean media and literature. It will be exciting to see what new questions are asked, what further sediments unearthed, as a result of Oh’s methodological interventions.