Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea

Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea PDF Author: Gi-Wook Shin
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295805129
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
The period from 1876 to 1946 in Korea marked a turbulent time when the country opened its market to foreign powers, became subject to Japanese colonialism, and was swept into agricultural commercialization, industrialization, and eventually postcolonial revolutionary movements. Gi-Wook Shin examines how peasants responded to these events, and to their own economic and political circumstances, with protests that shaped the course of postwar revolution in the north and reform in the south. Utilizing interviews, documentary research, and statistical analysis, Shin analyzes variation in peasant activism and its historical, political, and socioeconomic roots, and offers a major revisionist interpretation. The study contributes to an understanding of Korea’s rural political economy during the colonial era, Japanese agricultual policy, and the historical legacy of colonialism for post war social and political change in Korea.

Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea

Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea PDF Author: Gi-Wook Shin
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295805129
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
The period from 1876 to 1946 in Korea marked a turbulent time when the country opened its market to foreign powers, became subject to Japanese colonialism, and was swept into agricultural commercialization, industrialization, and eventually postcolonial revolutionary movements. Gi-Wook Shin examines how peasants responded to these events, and to their own economic and political circumstances, with protests that shaped the course of postwar revolution in the north and reform in the south. Utilizing interviews, documentary research, and statistical analysis, Shin analyzes variation in peasant activism and its historical, political, and socioeconomic roots, and offers a major revisionist interpretation. The study contributes to an understanding of Korea’s rural political economy during the colonial era, Japanese agricultual policy, and the historical legacy of colonialism for post war social and political change in Korea.

Building a Heaven on Earth

Building a Heaven on Earth PDF Author: Albert L. Park
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082483965X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why and how did Korean religious groups respond to growing rural poverty, social dislocation, and the corrosion of culture caused by forces of modernization under strict Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945)? Questions about religion's relationship and response to capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, and secularization lie at the heart of understanding the intersection between colonialism, religion, and modernity in Korea. Yet, getting answers to these questions has been a challenge because of narrow historical investigations that fail to study religious processes in relation to political, economic, social, and cultural developments. In Building a Heaven on Earth, Albert L. Park studies the progressive drives by religious groups to contest standard conceptions of modernity and forge a heavenly kingdom on the Korean peninsula to relieve people from fierce ruptures in their everyday lives. The results of his study will reconfigure the debates on colonial modernity, the origins of faith-based social activism in Korea, and the role of religion in a modern world. Building a Heaven on Earth, in particular, presents a compelling story about the determination of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), the Presbyterian Church, and the Ch'ŏndogyo to carry out large-scale rural movements to form a paradise on earth anchored in religion, agriculture, and a pastoral life. It is a transnational story of leaders from these three groups leaning on ideas and systems from countries, such as Denmark, France, Japan, and the United States, to help them reform political, economic, social, and cultural structures in colonial Korea. This book shows that these religious institutions provided discursive and material frameworks that allowed for an alternative form of modernity that featured new forms of agency, social organization, and the nation. In so doing, Building a Heaven on Earth repositions our understandings of modern Korean history.

Colonial Rule and Social Change in Korea, 1910-1945

Colonial Rule and Social Change in Korea, 1910-1945 PDF Author: Hong Yung Lee
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295804491
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Get Book Here

Book Description
Colonial Rule and Social Change in Korea 1910-1945 highlights the complex interaction between indigenous activity and colonial governance, emphasizing how Japanese rule adapted to Korean and missionary initiatives, as well as how Koreans found space within the colonial system to show agency. Topics covered range from economic development and national identity to education and family; from peasant uprisings and thought conversion to a comparison of missionary and colonial leprosariums. These various new assessments of Japan's colonial legacy may open up new and illuminating approaches to historical memory that will resonate not just in Korean studies, but in colonial and postcolonial studies in general, and will have implications for the future of regional politics in East Asia.

Ethnic Nationalism in Korea

Ethnic Nationalism in Korea PDF Author: Gi-Wook Shin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804768013
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explains the roots, politics, and legacy of Korean ethnic nationalism, which is based on the sense of a shared bloodline and ancestry. Belief in a racially distinct and ethnically homogeneous nation is widely shared on both sides of the Korean peninsula, although some scholars believe it is a myth with little historical basis. Finding both positions problematic and treating identity formation as a social and historical construct that has crucial behavioral consequences, this book examines how such a blood-based notion has become a dominant source of Korean identity, overriding other forms of identity in the modern era. It also looks at how the politics of national identity have played out in various contexts in Korea: semicolonialism, civil war, authoritarian politics, democratization, territorial division, and globalization.

Food and War in Mid-Twentieth-Century East Asia

Food and War in Mid-Twentieth-Century East Asia PDF Author: Katarzyna J. Cwiertka
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317134435
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Get Book Here

Book Description
War has been both an agent of destruction and a catalyst for innovation. These two, at first sight contradictory, yet mutually constitutive outcomes of war-waging are particularly pronounced in twentieth-century Asia. While 1945 marked the beginning of peaceful recovery for Europe, military conflicts continued to play a critical role in the historical development of this part of the world. In essence, all wars in twentieth-century Asia stemmed from the political vacuum that developed after the fall of the Japanese Wartime Empire, intricately connecting one region with another. Yet, they have had often very diverse consequences, shattering the homes of some and bringing about affluence to others. Disarray of war may halt economic activities and render many aspects of life insignificant. The need for food, however, cannot be ignored and the social action that it requires continues in all circumstances. This book documents the effects of war on the lives of ordinary people through the investigation of a variety of connections that developed between war-waging and the production, distribution, preparation and consumption of food throughout Asia since the 1930s. The topics addressed range from issues at stake at the time of the conflicts, such as provisioning the troops and food rationing and food relief for civilians, to long-term, often surprising consequences of war waging and wartime mobilization of resources on the food systems, diets, and tastes of the societies involved. The main argument of this volume is that war has not been a mere disruption, but rather a central force in the social and cultural trajectories of twentieth-century Asia. Due to its close connection with human nourishment and comfort, food stands central in the life of the individual. On the other hand, owing to its connection with profit and power, food plays a critical role in the social and economic organization of a society. What happens to food and eating is, therefore, an important index of change, a privileged basis for the exploration of historical processes.

The Global 1930s

The Global 1930s PDF Author: Marc Matera
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351780611
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: the Wilsonian moment betrayed, 1919-1929 -- Part I Primitive modern -- 1 '30s modern -- Part II Internationalism -- 2 Imperial internationalisms -- 3 Anti-colonial internationalisms -- Part III International crisis -- 4 The Great Depression -- 5 Revolts -- Part IV International challenges to liberalism -- 6 Global communism -- 7 Global fascism -- Conclusion: the road to war -- Index

Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey

Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey PDF Author: Michael E. Robinson
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824863275
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
For more than half of the twentieth century, the Korean peninsula has been divided between two hostile and competitive nation-states, each claiming to be the sole legitimate expression of the Korean nation. The division remains an unsolved problem dating to the beginnings of the Cold War and now projects the politics of that period into the twenty-first century. Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey is designed to provide readers with the historical essentials upon which to unravel the complex politics and contemporary crises that currently exist in the East Asian region. Beginning with a description of late-nineteenth-century imperialism, Michael Robinson shows how traditional Korean political culture shaped the response of Koreans to multiple threats to their sovereignty after being opened to the world economy by Japan in the 1870s. He locates the origins of both modern nationalism and the economic and cultural modernization of Korea in the twenty years preceding the fall of the traditional state to Japanese colonialism in 1910. Robinson breaks new ground with his analysis of the colonial period, tracing the ideological division of contemporary Korea to the struggle of different actors to mobilize a national independence movement at the time. More importantly, he locates the reason for successful Japanese hegemony in policies that included—and thus implicated—Koreans within the colonial system. He concludes with a discussion of the political and economic evolution of South and North Korea after 1948 that accounts for the valid legitimacy claims of both nation-states on the peninsula.

Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan

Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan PDF Author: Samuel Perry
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824840224
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
Recasting Red Culture turns a critical eye on the influential proletarian cultural movement that flourished in 1920s and 1930s Japan. This was a diverse, cosmopolitan, and highly contested moment in Japanese history when notions of political egalitarianism were being translated into cultural practices specific to the Japanese experience. Both a political and historiographical intervention, the book offers a fascinating account of the passions—and antinomies—that animated one of the most admirable intellectual and cultural movements of Japan’s twentieth century, and argues that proletarian literature, cultural workers, and institutions fundamentally enrich our understanding of Japanese culture. What sustained the proletarian movement’s faith in the idea that art and literature were indispensable to the task of revolution? How did the movement manage to enlist artists, teachers, and scientist into its ranks, and what sorts of contradictions arose in the merging of working-class and bourgeois cultures? Recasting Red Culture asks these and other questions as it historicizes proletarian Japan at the intersection of bourgeois aesthetics, radical politics, and a flourishing modern print culture. Drawing parallels with the experiences of European revolutionaries, the book vividly details how cultural activists “recast” forms of modern culture into practices commensurate with the goals of revolution. Weaving over a dozen translated fairytales, poems, and short stories into his narrative, Samuel Perry offers a fundamentally new approach to studying revolutionary culture. By examining the margins of the proletarian cultural movement, Perry effectively redefines its center as he closely reads and historicizes proletarian children’s culture, avant-garde “wall fiction,” and a literature that bears witness to Japan’s fraught relationship with its Korean colony. Along the way, he shows how proletarian culture opened up new critical spaces in the intersections of class, popular culture, childhood, gender, and ethnicity.

A Concise History of Modern Korea

A Concise History of Modern Korea PDF Author: Michael J. Seth
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442260483
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Get Book Here

Book Description
Now in a fully revised and updated edition, this history of modern Korea explores the social, economic, and political issues it has faced since being catapulted into the wider world at the end of the nineteenth century. Placing this formerly insular society in a global context, Michael J. Seth describes how this ancient, culturally and ethnically homogeneous society first fell victim to Japanese imperialist expansionism, and then was arbitrarily divided in half after World War II. Seth traces the postwar paths of the two Koreas—with different political and social systems and different geopolitical orientations—as they evolved into sharply contrasting societies. South Korea, after an unpromising start, became one of the few postcolonial developing states to enter the ranks of the first world, with a globally competitive economy, a democratic political system, and a cosmopolitan and dynamic culture. By contrast, North Korea became one of the world's most totalitarian and isolated societies, a nuclear power with an impoverished and famine-stricken population. Considering the radically different and historically unprecedented trajectories of the two Koreas, Seth assesses the insights they offer for understanding not only modern Korea but the broader perspective of world history. All readers looking for a balanced, knowledgeable history will be richly rewarded with this clear and cogent book.

A Companion to Korean American Studies

A Companion to Korean American Studies PDF Author: Rachael Miyung Joo
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004335331
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 727

Get Book Here

Book Description
A Companion to Korean American Studies presents interdisciplinary works from a number of authors who have contributed to the field of Korean American Studies. This collection ranges from chapters detailing the histories of Korean migration to the United States to contemporary flows of popular culture between South Korea and the United States. The authors present on Korean American history, gender relations, cultural formations, social relations, and politics. Contributors are: Sohyun An, Chinbo Chong, Angie Y. Chung, Rhoanne Esteban, Sue-Je Lee Gage, Hahrie Han, Jane Hong, Michael Hurt, Rachael Miyung Joo, Jane Junn, Miliann Kang, Ann H. Kim, Anthony Yooshin Kim, Eleana Kim, Jinwon Kim, Ju Yon Kim, Kevin Y. Kim, Nadia Y. Kim, Soo Mee Kim, Robert Ji-Song Ku, EunSook Lee, Se Hwa Lee, S. Heijin Lee, Shelley Sang-Hee Lee, John Lie, Pei-te Lien, Kimberly McKee, Pyong Gap Min, Arissa H. Oh, Edward J.W. Park, Jerry Z. Park, Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Margaret Rhee and Kenneth Vaughan.