문화냉전의 지역성 -대전문화원의 활동을 중심으로- = Locality of the Cultural Cold War : Focusing on the activities of Daejeon Culture Center

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper investigates the socio-historical characteristics of the culture centers that were established countrywide beginning with the Ganghwa Culture Hall after the liberation of Korea. The Culture Center is a propaganda machinery of the American culture opened by active support from the United States Information Service (USIS) in Korea, which oversees foreign public affairs for the United States. The centers have increased in number upon taking the Korean War as an opportunity. These centers held exhibitions, public lectures, and film screening based on anticommunism for the Korean residents with a purpose of creating “Free East Asia,” as pursued by the USIS.
After the Korean War, culture centers focused on activities developing anticommunism, hired employees, formed programs, and developed close relationships with regional administrations, police forces, education institutes, and even show proprietors who owned/managed commercial movie theaters. The Korean Culture Center Federation established after May 16 military coup in 1961 secured nationwide network and participated in the propaganda and publicity of American-style democracy and culture, and the industrialization and modernization led by Park Chung-hee.
To identify the specific aspects of locality during the cultural cold war, this paper analyzed the targets, regions, and the programs of movie tour activities conducted by the Daejeon Culture Center in Daejeon, Chungnam during the 1960s. From the analysis, it was identified that the activities of the culture center in Daejeon that switched to a rear military city after the Korean War had close relationships with the civil affairs and psychological warfare of the US military. Moreover, the paper claims that the locality of the Daejeon Culture Center’s activities in Korea is not separated from the locality of all Korean cultural centers’ activities but overlapped in terms of East Asian countries in the Cold War era.