| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, September 28, 2007 | 2:00PM - 4:00PM | Seminar Room 108N, Munk Centre For International Studies 1 Devonshire Place |
Critical Korean Studies Workshop
ABSTRACT:
This paper presents a critical re-examination of the nature and development of Japanese assimilation in colonial Korea through an ethnographic analysis of Seoul’s Shinto shrines and their festival celebrations. Unlike previous scholars who have treated assimilation as seen “from above” through elite discourses and/or official policies, I approach this guiding principle of Japanese colonialism “from below” by considering how a wider range of non-governmental actors and groups – situated in a hierarchy of ethnic, class, and gender relations – engaged with it on the ground. These interactions, as I show through a close reading of colonial newspaper articles and photographs, present a new picture of what assimilation meant in the localized context of the colonial capital, where a variety of cross-cutting interests and identities mitigated against the state’s ability to effectively incorporate the city’s Korean population into the spiritual culture of the Japanese settler community.
BIO:
Todd A. Henry is Assistant Professor of modern East Asian history at Colorado State University. His research interests include Japanese colonialism in Korea, critical studies of cities and space, and the history of gender and sexuality. He is the author of “Re-Spatializing Chosŏn’s Royal Capital: The Politics of Japanese Urban Reforms in Early Colonial Seoul, 1905-19” in Timothy Tangherlini and Sallie Yea’s (eds.) Sitings: Critical Approaches to Korean Geography (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008) and “Sanitizing Empire: Japanese Articulations of Korean Otherness and the Construction of Early Colonial Seoul, 1905-19,” Journal of Asian Studies vol. 64, no. 3 (August 2005). He is currently completing an essay on the socio-cultural history of Shintô shrines in colonial Korea, part of a book-length study entitled Keijō: Japanese Assimilation and the Politics of Space in Colonial Seoul, 1910-45.
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