COLONIAL HORRORS: THE STARVING GHOST IN COLONIAL KOREAN MASS CULTURE

Abstract

This article addresses image and narrative production during 1920s and 1930s colonial Korea. This question encompasses the symbolic order at the intersection of antiquity and the modern; in other words, image culture under emergent print capitalism and the changing constellation of representations in a new social symbolic. Specifically, I will address this new image culture through the rematerialization and repackaging of the agwi (the starving ghost) in mass-centered images and narratives: specifically, reader-submitted cartoons (tokchamanhwa), reportage and colonial literary representations of the starving ghost. An apparition called forth in representations of poverty and starvation, the starving ghost captures the material realities of the Korean lower classes.