Decolonizing the Mimetic Mechanism of Speculative Authenticity in Narco-Saints' Cultural Representation

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay critiques the workings of cultural representation in the 2022 Netflix original Korean drama series Narco-Saints, characterizing the manner in which the locale, culture, and people of Suriname have been depicted as being emblematic of internalized coloniality and its vicious circle of reproduction. Opening up with an exploration of the show's positioning as a true-story-based narrative that amplifies its gesture to a sense of authenticity by way of the spectacular setting and cinematography, I contend, Narco-Saints embodies what I call an aspiration to speculative authenticity, which in turn camouflages the biased nature of its representational politics. Drawing on thinkers and theorists, such as Walter Mignolo, Sigmund Freud, Gayathri Spivak, and Jean Baudrillard, and through close readings of specific scenes from the show and comparisons with other media content, I demonstrate how the series serves as an uncanny double to be repressed in the form of mis- and under-representation, creating a disconcerting dynamic whereby South Korean cultural production comes to perpetrate the very kind of alienation that it has long suffered, in the form of Orientalism and its varied iterations, upon a culture it now deems to be an undesirable other. What renders this mirror dynamic all the more troubling, I suggest, is the absence of authorial intent on the part of directorial and productional agency, which alludes to the fact that the practice of mimetic marginalization with regard to the Global South (and cultural communities that are considered likewise peripheral) had become a deeply ingrained and as such default baseline of perspectivization.

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