Jeeson Hong
Biography
Jeesoon Hong is a lecturer in Chinese culture at the University of Manchester, UK. Before joining the University of Manchester, she taught in the Department of Media Studies and Film at the New School, New York and in the Department of Comparative Literature at Korea University, Seoul. She completed her PhD in Chinese Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK and carried out post-doctoral research at J.W. Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany and Columbia University, USA. Her publications include works on stereotypes and martial arts films.
Title of Paper
Building Desires, Selling Spaces: Department Stores in Early Twentieth Century
Abstract
This paper examines department stores in Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul and Shanghai focusing on questions related to class, body, space and imperialism. The main question of this paper will be the way department stores contributed to the construction of modern man. Unlike the common view of linking department stores with the public space crystallizing flânerie, many German cultural critics like Karl Krauss, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer observe the end of flânerie with the emergence of department stores. Beginning from Kracauer’s analyses of the transformation of the Kaisergalerie, this paper will move on to Mitsukoshi department store in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Tokyo Mitsukoshi will be compared with its branches in the colonial cities of Seoul and Taipei. In Shanghai, this paper will focus on the department stores on Nanjing Road such as Sincere, Wing On and Sun Sun. It will examine bodily experiences in the spaces. Spaces such as rooftop gardens and arcades will be analysed as well as the locations in the cities, in particular in the foreign settlements in Seoul, Taipei and Shanghai. It will also explore questions such as the way urban temporality is reshaped by the seasonality of the department stores and the way they mark festivities.