Customer Reviews

Colonial Modernity in Korea

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I really like to recommend this anthology to all history and Korean studies interested people. The authors address to a very contentious and emotional topic of modern Korean history: the period of Japanese colonialism from 1910-1945.
However, this book doesn't cover this old and long well-known history what you maybe could expect. Deeply understanding the master narrative about political and cultural suppression or suffering what Koreans still maintain and the path to modernity from the Japanese side authors like Gi-Wook Shin, Michael Robinson or Clark Sorensen or Kenneth Wells turn to issues of Korean modernity and colonialism that are usually not covered by historians.
Indeed they attempt to initiate another kind of historiography: topics of everyday life, peasants, media (newspaper), human rights movement (Paeckchong), literature and the reflection of modernity, telecommunications network, policy of assimilation, significance of the Korean Nation after liberation and so on.
These historians break new grounds in Korean history in that they examine a history from below (!) concerning movements, everyday life during colonization or the quest for modernization, i.e. usual people's participation (instead of the aristocratic Yangban) on modernity. Nevertheless, they aspire to maintain the holistic claim. These authors try to relate the mentioned issues with the big political ones and concrete policy and thus underscore how various kinds of history (like political, social, media or literature) could be interwoven.