[KS] Jazz in Korea--Josephine Baker

Thu Nov 24 02:26:08 EST 2011

May I, as an interested onlooker to this discussion, throw in a centsworth?

There was a scene in the 2008 movie Cadillac Records (a fictionalised history of the Chess record company) where Muddy Waters is driving somewhere in the US countryside with the brilliant, but notoriously short-fused harmonica player Little Walter. They see by the roadside a parked van bearing the sign "The Little Walter Band". They stop the car, and Walter gets out and asks the the assembled musicians which one of them is Little Walter. When one of them identifies himself as such, the real Little Walter pulls out a gun and shoots him. While I couldn't find any factual basis for this scene, it is certainly a fact that successful jazz and blues artists, at a time when the broad public had little or no idea what they looked like, attracted numbers of imitators (a tradition that lives on, perhaps, in the form of "tribute bands"). I  recall BB King saying in an interview that there were a dozen bogus BB Kings touring the southern states at various times.

Assuming that the Yi Hyo-sŏk article is factual, the question arises, was the Josephine Baker he saw the real Josephine Baker? If she wasn't, that would be consistent with the evidence that suggests that her 1954 visit to Japan was her first.

Michael Duffy

Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 20:15:45 -0800
From: sotaebu at yahoo.com
To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
Subject: Re: [KS] Jazz in Korea--Josephine Baker

Dear Frank and list members,

In the interest of trying to get at some kind of truth and to keep a quite interesting and (I think) productive discussion going to see what we can learn from it, let me offer the following.

First, let's revisit three of Frank's assertions:

1.  - _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. 

2. 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.

3. The fact alone that he talks about "C-Harbor" (in the subtitle already) and not Chŏngjin Harbor should make us suspicious. 

As for number one, this is just not the case. As a matter of fact, Yi Hyoseok published five essays in Chogwang in 1936; in May, August, September, November, and December. If you read them, they are all clearly essays and NOT fiction. And this brings me to point number two above-they are included in vol. 7 of Yi's collected works, the supil collection not danpyeonseon which would be fiction.   
   The essay published in December, four months after the C-port essay, is the most interesting (after the original essay in question of course) for our discussion. It is titled "Goyohan {Dong}ui Bam: or "A Quiet Night at 'Dong'." Dong was the name of a cafe that Yi frequented in Nanam, Gyeonggi-do. In his essay about his visit to Cheongjin to see Baker, he mentions that he went with a friend that he became close to while frequenting the cafe "Dong." In "A Quiet Night at Dong" he identifies the man as a railway engineer and says that "This engineer had a great knowledge of music and was the only one (from Dong) to accompany me when I went to see the famous jazz singer in Chongjin." This is exactly the same thing he says in the original essay Gudae Gu Hangui Bam: "In our party 'R' and I were the only ones from the Dong crowd (that made the trip)..." If the original essay was fiction, or as Frank later suggets a "fictious report," why bother to repeat the fiction in another essay that is clearly not fiction and will obviously be read by the very friends he is talking about (among whom are other writers)? What conscientious writer would do that? At this point, we are trying to pound a square peg into a round hole.   

As to why there are no other reports of Josephine Baker's trip to Chongjin I can only speculate. Frank is asking why, if this article in Chogwang was not fiction, have not "every single article and website about Jazz in Korea and articles and Korean websites about Baker" not mentioned it. That's an easy one, they have not gone back and dug their way through obscure Chogwang articles nor have very many people read Yi's essays. Frank is talking about the present. So when it comes to this sort of thing not coming up on the radar in Korea it does not surprise me. The field of literary inquiry has been dominated by a nationalist need to construct a certain kind of past and view of historical events. A black jazz singer on her way to Manchuria does not weigh very heavily in that fomula. There is a great deal of material from the colonial period that is of interest outside of Korea that is simply ignored within the country. In the next Spring edition of the Walt Whitman Quaterly review I will have an article published titled "The Korean Adam: Yi Hyoseok and Walt Whitman." This  is a study of the very significant impact of Whitman on Yi's literature that is ultimately manifested in Yi's literary attempt to appropriate not only the poetics but the persona of Whitman in his fiction. No one in Korea has ever commented on this (with the exception of three lines in a book by professor Yu Jongho) beacuse it not the kind of thing that draws critical attention here. Whitman scholars on the other hand were fascinated by this. The focus in Korean critical circles has been too narrow. How many people know that there was a ski hill built in Sambang in 1927 and that some Koreans were drinking wine, eating cheese and skiing on weekends? I found this also in an Yi Hyoseok story and was able to confirm it. If I had not I would still be ignorant of that fact to this day (for whatever it's worth).  

One more point, unbeknownst to many, is that Yi Hyoseok, like Yi Sang, was a prolific essay writer. His collected essays include 88 works (many in Chogwang, four more in 1937). The essays of both of these writers have been mostly overlooked as sources of not only insight into the literary milleu of the time, but also of social, cultural, and historical events and trends. 

As to point three, it was a literary convention of the time to use an initial to identify not only places, but people (as can be seen above e.g., "R"). Both Yi Hyoseok and Yi Sang make abundant use of this convention, and that much more so in their essays than in their fiction because, no doubt, they are talking about reality.  I hope this helps.

 All the best, 

Steven Capener   

From: Frank Hoffmann <hoffmann at koreaweb.ws>
To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws 
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2011 2:07 PM
Subject: Re: [KS] Jazz in Korea--Josephine Baker

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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