An Enemy Within: Imagining the Collaborator in Transwar France and Korea

Abstract

In this dissertation, I analyze representations of the collaborator, a figure from the occupied community who works with their occupiers, in media works that address the Japanese Occupation of Korea (1910-45) and Nazi Occupation of France (1940-44). Across the chapters, I examine narratives that depict the collaborator in novels, historiography, films, and memorial museum exhibits emerging throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. I argue that, across these media, the collaborator has been transformed from a historical actor into an archetypized figure that shapes and delimits the way occupation is collectively imagined. By emphasizing ideological continuities of the pre- and post-war (the “long transwar”), I highlight France and Korea as sites where memories of war and occupation overlap in an unexpected but persuasive parallel. The dissertation is therefore organized around conceptual frameworks that include both French and Korean works in each chapter. Working from a transregional comparative perspective, I address a gap in extant scholarship on collaboration, which does not adequately recognize the figure of the collaborator as transnationally referential and mobile. While current discourse on the collaborator is dominated by questions of accountability and justice, juridico-ethical modes are increasingly unable to account for the enduring and indeed separate prevalence of the collaborator as a cultural imaginary. By identifying collaborator “archetypes,” I elaborate the ways that this figure is intentionally bound to other pejorative characterizations (madness, promiscuity, perversity) to amplify their status as a threat to the nation. I argue that one cannot assume that negative affects associated with the collaborator attach to the figure organically; instead, the collaborator is linked to these iterations of non-normativity across a constellation of transmedial, transnational narrative objects. By closely reading voice, form, and metaphor in these works, I propose that the collaborator must be understood as a malleable cultural figuration buried within and indeed constitutive of post-1945 nationalist formations.