Unhistorical Use of History: The Manchurian Western and Critical Monumentalism

South Korean cinema recently saw a regeneration of the Manchurian Western, a vernacular action film genre drawing upon the Western. Confirming the Western’s lasting transnational versatility across borders, the public attention films like The Good, the Bad, The Weird could garner begs the question of what resonance and relevance does the Western as an American genre par excellence have beyond its home. Revolving around this question, my talk explores the convoluted ways in which the Western could work as a catalyst of sub- or countercultural sensibilities in Korean society. Born in a land far-flung from America, the Korean Western has largely worked through a more tortuous process of adaptation than its counterparts in other regions, which makes the subgenre all the more complex and intriguing. Its reworking of the Western’s epic ethos in a non-epic setting such as colonized Manchuria harkens back to such concepts as “minor literature” (Deleuze)—which a minority create within the major language and where they become a nomad in relation to (not necessarily in protest against) the ruling language—and “monumental history” (Nietzsche)—which can serve as a valid antidote when our history turns harmful to life.This talk particularly concerns how the subgenre challenges national history, more precisely, nationalist discourse, as it integrates exogenous tropes with endogenous counter-historical experiences and sentiments.

Seung-hwan Shin lectures in East Asian Languages & Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. He specializes in Korean cinema and popular culture. His publications include “Singing Through Impossible Modernization: Sopyonje and National Cinema in the Era of Globalization” in The Two Koreas and Their Global Engagements (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) and “Korea, the Land of the Living Dead: The Biopolitics of the Korean Zombie Apocalypse” in Metamorphosis, 1 (2021). He is currently working on a book project, Disenchanted Times, Reenchanted Cinema: Korean Film Renaissance Reframed.