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My Car Modernity: What the U.S. Army Brought to South Korean Cinematic Imagination about Modern Mobility

This article examines the cultural logic of mobilization in postcolonial South Korea, promoted through American cinematic representations. In early 1946, the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea started importing and distributing American propaganda films. These audiovisual textbooks for “free people” praised private car ownership and self-determined mobility, attracting audiences with scenes of automobiles and expressways. This might have encouraged audiences to imagine a self-regulating and untrammeled unit where they could choose their own destination, speed, and companions, symbolized in the ideal type of car-owning nuclear family. Such representational expressions of “maik'a” (my car) were closely linked with the global transition after World War II, such as the nuclearization of the family, the rise of the automobile industry, and the emergence of small screens at home. This shows how South Koreans were exposed to a new, liberal technology of government under U.S. hegemony, after the cessation of Japanese railway imperialism.