The Topography of Crime and the Desire to Tail: Detective Fiction in Colonial Korea

Detective fiction was one of the most popular literary genres in colonial Korea that served readers and writers in their imagination of modernity in the areas of forensic science, law and policing, urban development, etc. This talk explores the imagination of colonial modernity by examining two representative detective fiction that were produced in colonial Korea, Beautiful Demon (1934) by Ch’ae Mansik and Beyond the Horizon (1934) by Kim Tongin by focusing on two key features common to both works: the transnational dimension of crimes and the detective’s act of tailing as a manifestation of the desire to transcend colonial boundaries. Considering how the colonial state’s censorship was tightened in the 1930s, the wide circulation of the genre around the time is noteworthy because of the potentially subversive narratives conventional to the genre. Horrendous crimes and murders in urban settings, for example, may be viewed as a criticism of the colonial order. The figure of the Korean private detective, who possesses the ability to cross geographical and socioeconomic boundaries, is also significant for his transgression of the colonial judicial system. This talk provides the cultural context in which such works were produced and probes how the genre served writers and readers in imagining their agency as reflected in the works.

Jooyeon Rhee is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. She is a researcher of popular literature and visual culture of modern Korea and Japan. She published a monograph, The Novel in Transition: Gender and Literature in Early Colonial Korea (Cornell University Press, 2019), and edited five special issues for peer-review journals on diasporic art, socially engaged art, and popular culture. Currently, she is writing a monograph on Korean and Japanese detective fiction and conducting book-length research on food in diasporic literature and film.