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The present study aims to compare the cinematic propaganda of colonial Korea and Nazi Germany, revealing how the two countries used film to construct narratives of nationalism. Furthermore, this study will aid our recognition and understanding of the similarities and differences between victims and aggressors in spreading nationalist propaganda. Despite the similarities between the colonial Korean and Nazi German film industries in spreading nationalist propaganda, there are significant differences between these two countries' ways of promoting national values: the colonial Koreans adopted transcolonial nationhood (i.e. the strategy of integrating nations), whereas the Nazis excluded minorities, such as Jews. Therefore, dichotomous evaluations of the victim and the aggressor are inconsistent with existing standard interpretations. Colonial Korea, generally known as having experienced the trauma of colonization, also engaged in cinematic fabrication and the weaponization of history, as Nazi Germany did. Propaganda films in both colonial Korea and Nazi Germany played a significant role in reconstructing their national identities. Regarding the cinematic reinvention of these national identities, we should eschew the artificial dichotomy between victims and aggressors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite Korea's independence from Japan in 1945, collective memories of Japanese colonialism continue to shape South Korean national identity today. This article extends Charland's theory of constitutive rhetoric and reconsiders Billig's theory of banal nationalism to analyse key discourses of national memory in South Korea, including presidential speeches delivered on the Liberation Day of Korea (Gwangbokjeol) and exhibits at the Independence Hall (Dongnip Ginyeomgwan). This article examines how South Korean nationalistic discourses today, by fostering a sustained antagonism towards the Japanese, constitute a national identity in an inextricable relationship to the Japanese Other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Korean Modern Art History began to be produced in the 1970s, when Western Modernist Art History, based on Formalism, was introduced as a matrix to map the 'evolution' of 20th century Korean Art. Korean modern art history is based in the same paradigm as the West, beginning with Impressionism and 'ending' with Abstract Expressionism. First introduced to the country from the West immediately after the Korean War, Korean Abstract Expressionism is now deemed as South Korea's ultimate 'progressive' and 'modern' art form, a 'Korean' painting style combining the Western art form with traditional artistic concepts of 'Scholarly Painting' (muninhwa). Japanese-influenced painting styles originating in the colonial period (1910-45) are rejected as 'non-authentic.' The problem is that Scholarly Painting was a gender and class specific art born from the rigid Confucian culture of pre-modern Korea, and thus its revival as an 'ultimate modern' and 'Korean' form has the consequence of locating traditionally-gendered notions of art and artist at the core of the South's modern art. This essay uses a Semiotic approach to deconstruct this gendered modernist rhetoric by tracing the emergence of the sign 'Koreaness' in South Korean modern art, showing how it is defined within Korean Abstract Painting as an 'ultimate Korean sign' and how its use of anti-Japanese rhetoric covers up the traumatic history of the Korean War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]