[KS] Jazz in Korea--Josephine Baker

Frank Hoffmann hoffmann at koreaweb.ws
Wed Nov 23 00:07:18 EST 2011


Dear Steven, and All:

As far as I am aware of not a single scholar, historian or music  
specialist, has ever stated that Baker visited East Asia before 1954,  
so your and John's claim seem pretty unique, and the first printed  
evidence you gave us (the February 8,1940 _Tonga ilbo_ article)  
already proofed to be a report about her activities in EUROPE. That  
was for late 1939 or early 1940. Now, with the _Chogwang 朝光_ magazine  
it is about 1936. There then is ONLY that single piece by Yi Hyo-sŏk,  
no newspaper report, nothing else from Korea, Japan, China, or all the  
scholars interested in Jazz and music will have overlooked that?  
Possible, certainly possible, but still really strange, especially if  
you consider how much has been published on Baker in Japan where Jazz  
has always been much more popular than in Korea. There are e.g.  
reports about how such and such Japanese artist got inspired while  
serving in the military in Manchuria by listening to songs by Baker,  
BUT there is no single mention of Baker having actually performed  
herself, in person, in Manchuria or Japan.

- _Chogwang_ is a known magazine from that time, and everyone doing  
work on colonial Korea is familiar with it. If that "Baker visit" (Yi  
Hyo-sŏk's piece) would have been taken for real and not just as  
fiction, then SURE every single article and website about Jazz in  
Korea and articles and Korean websites about Baker (by Koreans) would  
have mentioned that already. But nothing... It really does not matter  
all too much how Yi's daughter classifies that TODAY. We need to look  
at the original publication, not a re-published Han'gŭl edition (I  
suppose that is what you refer to, yes, the 2009 edition?).
_Chogwang_ was a literature magazine, published by the Chosŏn Ilbosa,  
although in later years it was transformed into a kind of propaganda  
magazine to support the Japanese war effort. What you find in there in  
1935/36, however, before the Pacific War, is literature, is fiction.

'Kohyang' & 'New Woman' & Local Colors:

Please bear with me--I am trying to contextualize, as I think teh  
context is most important here, not just some factual history (not  
just if Baker was in Korea or if she was not): The 1936 special theme  
of _Chogwang_ was "kohyang" (home town, native place, in extension  
homeland). In the early and mid-1930s this was a popular theme in  
colonial Korea, one of the themes that was at its base given by the  
Japanese authorities, same as the theme of "new woman." You can see  
this theme appearing in painting as well, not just literature. In  
painting we know it under the term "local colors"--originally "couleur  
locale" in French, but then theorized mostly in Germany towards the  
end of the 19th century as "Lokalkolorit"--both in literature and in  
art. In Korea and under colonial conditions (and same in Taiwan, by  
the way), this becomes a very different theme, and a very very central  
one, both during and after the colonial period. You will find that in  
the mainstream SOUTH Korean discourse on colonial period art this is  
one of the three main topics that South Korean scholars and  
journalists (mostly since the late 1980s) are pounding on like it were  
Cruella De Vil herself. As I tried to show in a recent chapter on the  
development of North Korean Chosŏnhwa painting (in Rüdiger Frank's  
volume), the NORTH Korean discourse is completely different in this  
respect--where those colonial approaches on local identity were  
continuously developed (with a short interruption during the Soviet  
occupation) since the mid-1950s: this is one of the reasons why  
journalists and visitors from the South talking about "collaborator"  
tagged artists and writers on visits to the North seem at times so  
surprised about reactions there. North and South stew in their own  
juice, have almost completely different discourses going on. (We all  
do that, of course.) ... As an example from painting, look at Yi  
In-sŏng's 1934 oil painting "A Day in Fall," in the South usually  
canonized as an exemplary work of pro-Japanese "collaboration" (while  
at the same time appreciated aesthetically).
-> http://hoam.samsungfoundation.org/exhibition/lee/view/pop/images/2_01.jpg
This undeniable comes close to Paul Gauguin's early 1890s works from  
Tahiti. Once you have the colonizer's gaze on the native (read  
primitive) sexized colonial subject and once the colonized one's  
imitating the colonizer's view. That at least has been the mainstream  
South Korean take on the issue for the past 30+ years. (And that  
discourse has been as boring, uninventive, and monologic as it  
possibly can get in art history.) Now let me come back to Yi Hyo-sŏk  
and his various pieces for _Chogwang_ in 1936. Yi Hyo-sŏk's works for  
_Chogwang_ were written in that same context, which was then seen as a  
positive one, as a challenge to develop some sort of a Korean  
identity, apart from Japanese modernity but not against it. So, that  
main theme was basically given to Yi. And both in literature and in  
painting the "exotic woman" was one of the usual subject matters, but  
also the "new woman," the "creative woman" for which western women  
were the model ... in painter Yi In-sŏng's case, in the mentioned  
example at least, it was an exoticized Korean girl in a poor  
country-side setting, exoticized through Western means of depictions  
and points of view (then still new for Korea), while for writer Yi  
Hyo-sŏk and many others this was usually a Western woman with Western  
accessoirs (cloth, perfume bottles, furs, high heel shoes, magazines,  
etc.). The image of a bare-breasted dancer (and yes, Baker really did  
that too), a beautiful black American in Paris was a more than perfect  
match here! So, my point is that in itself the appearance of Josephine  
Baker in 1930s Korean magazines is anything but a surprise! To the  
opposite, it is most typical for 1930s Korean culture.

Now, you say that Yi Hyo-sŏk's piece in this literary magazine is not  
literature, not fiction, but a documentary report. It is indeed  
re-published as "tanp'yŏn sŏn," and maybe it was published as this  
originally.
But again, we talk about a writer here, not a journalist, and one that  
did other pieces in 1936, all with the 'kohyang' theme in the center,  
trying to depict, on his and his times terms, Korea as a  
not-yet-modernized but on the way to modernization culture (sorry  
about my English, this can sure be phrased better). The context in  
itself suggests this is also fiction. The fact alone that he talks  
about "C-Harbor" (in the subtitle already) and not Chŏngjin Harbor  
should make us suspicious. A "report" can of course be a fictitious  
report, which is just another genre of fiction. That is exactly what  
we have here! Or, as an essay about the 2009 edition says, "(dreams,  
fantasies, imagination) to construct the idealized woman"--that is  
exactly what we have here as well. I do not have that 2009 edition,  
but one of the book sellers publishes a "Publisher's Review" here:
http://www.yes24.com/24/goods/3450735
Click on the small "continue" button to see the full text. With  
reference to the here discussed <그때 그 항구의 밤> that review clearly  
states, I quote: "그에게 진정한 예술(문학)은 단순한 현실의 반영에 머물지 않고, 현실의 소재를 유기적으로  
재구성한 미적 구조물이다." This may not necessarily be the most enlightening  
review either, yet it at least gets to the point on this issue.


Best regards,
Frank


--------------------------------------
Frank Hoffmann
http://koreaweb.ws





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