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Kritika Kultura

Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8292-4594

Abstract

This essay addresses Korean islanders who were produced and disregarded by Japanese colonialism as colonial wasted lives under the Japanese colonial regime on the Korean Peninsula by examining Se-dŏk Ham’s drama “Mui-do Gihaeng” through a conjunction of Zygmunt Bauman’s conception of wasted humans and Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of Auschwitz. As an inevitable and inseparable outcome of the colonial order-building process— particularly in Korean marine territory—colonial wasted lives, rendered disenfranchised and excluded, inhabit a marginal island in the West Sea, where they seek only survival under the constant risk of death, thereby engendering the routinization of death. This condition enables their characterization as collateral casualties of colonial progress, disclosing a scandal of the colonial regime itself: a regime that produced such collateral casualties while evading responsibility for their deaths. Moreover, by characterizing Mui-do as a collateral volkloser Raum in which Korean islanders persist as colonial wasted lives through the endurance of routinized death, the essay attends to an otherwise silenced voice of suffering emerging from a marginal island adrift at sea. Articulated in the form of recitation, this voice enables both the spatial demarginalization of a collateral volkloser Raum and the problematization of the temporal repetition of the Japanese colonial regime, while simultaneously relocating this excluded space into the audience’s lived reality of colonial Korea around 1940. Foregrounding the otherwise inaudible suffering of those excluded from recognition within colonial politics, the essay thus argues that Ham’s drama constitutes an immanent attempt to undermine the colonial order from within.

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