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IN SEARCH OF KOREAN TRADITIONAL OPERA: DISCOURSES OF CH'ANGGUK. By Andrew Killick. University of Hawai'i Press, 2010. 254 pp. ISBN 978-0-8248-3290-2. Hardcover, $48.00.
Andrew Killick's In Search of Korean Traditional Opera: Discourses of Ch'angguk is an interdisciplinary work that examines traditional Korean opera in two distinct forms. One is the discourse about ch'angguk and its history-a discourse that constructs ch'angguk as Korean traditional opera. The other is the discourse within and through ch'angguk, which has propagated certain ideas about Korea and its traditions. Killick is broadly interested in the convergence of discourses of nation, gender, aesthetics, cross-cultural comparison, and the postcolonial conditions that surrounds ch'angguk's status. He focuses on the form and content of performances to answer the question a Korean audience member posed to him and that he discusses in the introduction: "What do you think of Korean traditional opera?" (p. xvi). The most significant component of Killick's work is his inquiry into Korean nationalism in relation to the performing arts. He discusses why a Korean traditional opera helps formulate Korean national identity, and he suggests ways ch'angguk can become better recognized by foreign audiences.
Killick begins with his own spectatorship and interest in researching ch'angguk. He examines Korean nationalists' contemporary attempts to recreate this turn-of-the-twentieth-century genre as a national drama and the difficulties in doing so (p. xviii). He makes a distinction between p'ansori (story singing, which he sees as a traditional genre) and ch'angguk, which grows from this earlier genre. Careful discussion of the genesis is inevitable in...