Intimate Threats of Empire: Spies and Manchuria in Print Culture of Colonial Korea

Abstract

This paper investigates images of women in “Manchurian spy narratives” in print media in Korea at the end of the colonial era, between 1941 and 1945. This literature can be categorized as a sub-genre of transnational crime fiction, which thrived in the 1930s-1940s in Korea. Unlike earlier literature about Manchuria as a farming frontier, Manchurian spy narratives present international spies and crime against the backdrop of Japanese Empire, often featuring ambiguous female characters. The un-trustable female figures are racialized and sexualized, sometimes passing with multiple identities. They are femme-fatales, victims of sexual crimes, and highly skilled assassins. The conspicuous changes in Manchurian narrative genre fiction published in colonial Korea reflect the imperialized relationship between Korea and Manchuria (and China). Also, by setting threatening women outside the Korean peninsula, these stories effectively foreground the “danger” of the frontier and New Women, and are able to highlight the importance of domestic housewives at the wartime. In this presentation, I focus on fictions and articles printed in Sinsidae magazine (January 1941- February 1945), one of the few magazines that published Korean fiction at the end of the colonial era in Korea. I contextualize several short stories by An Chŏn-min and Nam Su-gil, and a serialized novel by Kim Nae-sŏng, the most celebrated detective novel writer at the time. I argue that, even under the heaviest censorship, print culture found room for imagining transnational expansion.