"Critical Voices, Contested Spaces: Spatial Transformations and the Emergence of Anti-Japanese Student Protest in Colonial Korea"
November 18, 2009
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM,
4pm, 1080 S. University, Suite 1636, School of Social Work Building
Host Department: Center for Korean Studies (CKS)
Deborah Solomon, Joint post-doctoral fellow, Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies and the Korea Institute, Harvard University
Further Information
Japanese colonial rule created new spatial conceptions on the Korean peninsula both by transforming local public spaces in Korea and by requiring Koreans to imagine themselves as members of a larger Japanese empire. It was within this framework, in turn, that the new subject position of the student protester emerged. From 1924 onward, Korean students frequently staged school boycotts, sparked by conflicts with unpopular teachers, disagreements in the classroom, and general dissatisfaction with the Japanese education system and with colonial rule as a whole. These small-scale regional protests culminated in a peninsula-wide student protest movement in 1929 and 1930, which involved 194 schools and as many as 54,000 students.
This lecture will explore one of the most striking elements of Korean student protest in the late 1920s and early 1930s—the use of protest manifestoes which, when distributed by students as both a precursor to and as part of their street protests, furthered protesters’ aims to reconfigure and reclaim public colonial spaces. Examining these manifestoes allows us to better understand how protesters conceived of their own activities and goals, framed their rejections of Japanese colonialism, and envisioned a utopic post-colonial Korean nation that social protest could help to engender.
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