Popular as Political Culture: The Fatherland, Nationalist Films, and Modernity in South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines

Abstract

The experience of modernity results from the emergent social relations formed in liberalized market economies, which also posit as sites of newer forms of pain and suffering as especially experienced by those in the margins. As national economies undergo liberalization to survive in globalization, so are their political structures reshaped to become conducive to transnational capital. The essay discusses the relationship of the state and civil society in a postcolonial national setting, looking into their operations and parameters in the South Korean film A Single Spark. The analysis of the effects of the state and civil society in issues of citizenship and urban being is discussed in the Taiwanese film Super Citizen Ko. The transformation of the national into the transnational state and civil society is discussed in the Philippine film Eskapo.