Politics And Intellectuals Of Colonial Korea

Abstract

This thesis attempts to complicate our perspective on politics and intellectuals of colonial Korea (1910-1945). Accordingly, the task of this thesis is threefold. Firstly, it tries to revise the meaning of politics so as to reconsider the political indifference of certain intellectuals in the period. In addition, it broadens the range of politics so that it can refer not only to such prevalent interpretation of Japanese colonial politics as coercive and oppressive rule over Koreans, but also to such possible or secondary explanation as consensual politics, or the persuasion of the colonized to voluntarily accept the colonial order and system. Finally, the thesis rethinks the at-once opposing and collaborating relationship between Japanese colonialism and Korean nationalism based on the establishment of the interstate economic structure between Japan and Korea, in order to see how it was maintained and what it purported. Specifically, Chapter 2 discusses Gramsci's theory of intellectuals in Prison Notebooks to show how his theoretical work is pertinent to the study of intellectuals and politics. Chapter 3 discloses the Korean modern writer Yisang's unseen politicality in his writing of the essay "Ennui." Chapter 4 shows how Yanagi Muneyoshi, a Japanese folk-art critic and the leader of the mingei movement in prewar Japan, successfully produced Koreans as a modern nation under the so-called Cultural Rule of the Japanese colonial government in the early 1920s.