Imperfectible narrative within colonial melancholia: Gendered sovereignty and the technology of colonial subjects in the wartime Korean propaganda film, The Volunteer (1941)

This article examines colonial melancholia among conflicting positions of colonial subjects represented in the 1941 film, Jiwŏnbyŏng/The Volunteer. This wartime propaganda film tells the story of a colonial Korean man who joins the Imperial Japanese Army following implementation of the Special Volunteer Army System in 1938. By showing the ways in which discourses of assimilation into, and imperialization by, the Japanese empire become an ‘imperfectible’ narrative in colonial Koreans’ production of local discourses, this paper conveys the discourse of Koreans’ Imperial subjecthood as an expression of melancholia through a close examination of narratives from the literary works of female writer Ch’oe Chong-Hui and the pro-Japanese The Volunteer. I aim to establish a theoretical and historical framework for analysing colonial mentality during the Total War era and the formation of continual colonial epistemology.