[규장각한국학연구원] 제89회 콜로키엄 안내 : From Kimpo to Incheon Airport: A Postcolonial Reading of Korean Globalism and its Developmentalist History

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5월 29일 금요일 오후 4시에 제89회 콜로키엄을 개최합니다. 장소는 규장각 1층 회의실(112호)입니다.

이번 강연은 미국 University of California, Berkeley에서 박사 학위를 받으신 Alice Soojin Kim선생님께서

From Kimpo to Incheon Airport: A Postcolonial Reading of Korean Globalism and its Developmentalist History

라는 주제로 발표해주실 예정입니다.

Alice Soojin Kim선생님께서는 미국 Bonston University, Department of Art History에서 학사, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Rhetoric에서 석사와 박사 학위를 받으시고, 현재 규장각한국학연구원에 펠로우로 와계십니다.

아래에 발표 개요를 첨부하오니, 관심 있는 많은 분들의 참여 부탁드립니다.

From Kimpo to Incheon Airport: A Postcolonial Reading of Korean Globalism and its Developmentalist History

Alice Soojin Kim(University of California, Berkeley 박사)

Incheon international airport, begun in 1989 and opening in 2001, presents both the most ambitious expansion of South Korea’s capital international airport, and one exemplary case of a new generation of mega-airports in Asia or ‘airport cities,’ featuring some of the largest and most sensational airport projects of the 21st century. Incheon follows from a half-century of continuous airport expansions since the opening of the first modern International Style terminal at Kimpo in February 1960, including the construction of two additional ‘kiwa’ terminals (from 1972-1980, and 1980-1988), facilitating the political-economy and socio-cultural ideology of the developmental state. At the same time, it also follows from major shifts in global political economy and regional geopolitics, such as the rise of neoliberal globalization, the fall of the Soviet Union, China’s transition to market capitalism, and the rise of Asian NIC’s, local and national changes such as the liberalization of travel (1989) accompanying political democratization and economic liberalization, the growth of high-tech and mass culture industries, as well as key changes to the airport paradigm itself. Not only has the world accessible from the national gateway expanded beyond the bi-polar Cold War internationalist map of the capitalist ‘free world’ which circumscribed its predecessors at Kimpo, Incheon was initially planned to compete among regional mega-airports as the ‘21st century Northeast Asian Regional Hub’ with an eye to both the state’s improving relations with the Soviet Union and China as well as the needs of a prospective reunified Korean peninsula. The new Incheon airport, replete with showrooms, exhibition and conference centers, free trade zones, hotels, retailing, and a golf course indexes yet a new global configuration of economic and cultural models, geopolitical alignments and national growth strategies envisioned since the late 1980s.

In this paper, I look at what is new about Incheon’s ‘globalism’ examined within the historically changing national-global configurations of postcolonial South Korean airports from Cold war internationalism and developmental national capitalism to neo-developmental globalization. First, I examine how from the very first Kimpo terminal the modern airport in postcolonial Korea came into being as an ‘international stage’ in both a temporal and spatial sense—both as the threshold to a synchronic yet hierarchical geography of global modernity, and as an ideological stage or platform where the nation’s modernity (as ‘development’) was put on display, garnered and recognized as a measure of ruling ‘international’ aesthetic, cultural, and technological norms, with dislocating and particularizing effects. Second, I take account of what is new about Incheon’s globalism from its ‘world-class’ appraisals, new deployments of national heritage/ culture, the death of the street, and new narratives of ‘arrival’ in official and mainstream media representations (i.e. diasporic, economic, cultural), and contextualize these processes in relation to official and popular discourses and processes of globalization in South Korean society more broadly. Third, I look at the relationship between this new globalism and its previous historical iterations, examining how traces of earlier myths of development have been reconfigured, taking on new guises in response to the changing position of the South Korean economy and neoliberal global capitalism. Lastly, contrary to predominant ahistorical postmodernist and post-national readings of contemporary airport space and culture associated with globalization and urban theories of ‘flow space’ and ‘global cities,’ I consider how Incheon airport opens up to postcolonial considerations of the overlapping contradictions of uneven capitalist development and national developmentalism, as well as implications for the globalist ethos that stems from the evolutionary developmental paradigm of progress.

Keywords: South Korean capital airports, uneven development, national developmentalism, postcolonial modernity, globalism and neo-developmental globalization

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