Colonial Legacies and the Struggle for Social Membership in a National Community: The 1946 People's Uprisings in Korea

The historical experience of colonialism exerts a profound influence upon emergent postcolonial societies. Yet colonial legacies are not passed on in precisely the same way; rather, they are contingent on particular historical processes. In the case of Korea, Japanese colonialism gave way to a brief liberation phase that was followed by another foreign occupation (the U.S. in the south and the U.S.S.R. in the north) during which efforts were made to rebuild the political community. Focusing on the 1946 people's uprisings, the largest popular social movement during the U.S. occupation period, as a pivotal historical event, this article examines why the primary target of the uprisings was not the foreign military government but fellow Koreans, especially police officers, bureaucrats, and wealthy landlords, thereby revealing how Japanese colonial rule influenced the movement's choice of targets as well as its eventual failure. Through this historical analysis, I demonstrate that internal conflicts among Koreans, which were created and rearticulated through Japanese colonial rule, became critical sources of social and political struggles under the American occupation, the important consequence of which lies in the creation of a pattern of internal exclusion that characterized South Korea's post‐war political trajectory.     

Picturing Empire and Illness

Reflecting on recent debates within cultural studies on non-Western modernities and ‘cultural studies in/of Asia’, this essay explores a cultural history of venereal disease (VD) in Korea under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). The colonial representation of and discourse on VD in Western colonial settings was often built around a missionary medical account of sin and disease and a colonial dialectic of white civilization and non-white backwardness. This essay draws attention to the colonial discourse on VD in the non-Western Japanese Empire and its East Asian context, which compels us to look into the colonial framing of disease and bodies in imperial contexts where ruler and ruled shared close racial, cultural and religious affinities and where colonial medical power did not stem from white hegemony and Christian religious authority. By using methods from cultural studies and feminist history, this essay uncovers and critically reads the Japanese colonial medical and popular cultural archives on VD that range from state documents to laboratory reports to patent medicine advertisements, in order to reconfigure Japan's colonial medical empire and its underlying, gendered assumptions. It clarifies not only the legal, military and institutional bases for the intense governmental control over VD, but also the cultural image, metaphor and knowledge of VD and the biomedical female body promoted by Japan's transnational patent medical industry in close collaboration with the colonial state. By doing so, this essay sheds light on the gendered epistemic violence of Japanese colonialism.     

Roads to American Empire: U.S. Military Public Works and Capitalist Transitions, 1898–1934.

Between 1898 and 1934, in synchronous and successive U.S. military interventions and occupations in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, American soldiers made public works, and especially roads, into a global technology of imperial power. This essay examines infrastructure as a factor in state formation and capitalist transition in these five different imperial spaces as a way to study U.S. empire, and its effects on foreign societies, through a comparative, global, and intra‐imperial approach often precluded by the methodological nationalism of historical and sociological literatures. Despite significant differences between these sites of U.S. war and occupation, both prior to American interventions and during them, U.S. military public works expressed and advanced a common political‐economic logic of state centralization and capital accumulation. Colonial and post‐colonial political institutions and political economies, the strength of central governments, the extent of plantation agriculture and rural proletarianization, world commodity markets, and geography and natural events varied, but determined U.S. imperial infrastructure's outcomes. By the 1930s, the U.S. military had elevated infrastructural improvement to a key repertoire of American imperial power in the world, and one which persisted as the United States turned away from formal colonialism in the era of the Cold War and decolonization.     

Representations of “the West,”“Japan,” and “the Periphery” in the Discourse of Lafcadio Hearn Studies

The purpose of this article is to analyze representations of “the West,”“Japan,” and “the Periphery” in the discourse of research on Lafcadio Hearn (“Hearn studies”) from pre‐war Japan. The nature and construction of nationality will be analyzed by examining where the representations of “the West,”“Japan,” and “the Periphery” intersected. During the 1900s, researchers in the field of Hearn studies recognized that “Japan” lacked—and thus sought—a universality similar to what existed in “the West.” The tone of the discourse shifted during the 1910s through 1920s however, and what came to be emphasized was “Japan's” peculiarity. By the 1930s through 1940s, “Japan” aimed to show to “the West” a new universality that was different from what existed in Europe and America. Yet simultaneously, in order to legitimize its representation of its self, “Japan” portrayed “the Periphery” as an object that was both excluded and absorbed or appropriated into that image. On the one hand, “Japan” received and internalized the Orientalist viewpoint of “the West.” In fact, “Japan” was always conscious of its self‐image as something to display to “the West.” On the other hand, in order to create that self‐portrayal, both a representation of “the Periphery” and a reflection from that same “Periphery” were essential. While representations of “Japan” were produced, reproduced, and reinforced through interactions with “the West” and “the Periphery,” the intersecting behavior of these three entities also points to a residual ambiguity in “Japan's” nationality. By analyzing the discourse in Hearn studies, this paper reveals how the interaction between “Japan” and the two others of “the West” and “the Periphery” helped construct and destabilize its nationality.     

“White Men Are This Nation:” Right‐Wing Militias and the Restoration of Rural American Masculinity*

Abstract The appearance of right‐wing militias was a much‐discussed phenomenon during the past decade. Commentators rightly pointed out their rural origins, their lower‐middle‐class and middle‐class composition, and their ideology rooted in racism, sexism, anti‐Semitism, and homophobia, but few, if any, have commented on the most salient aspect of all: that these are movements of men, who use narratives about masculinity as an analytic prism through which to understand their own situation and to problematize the identities of “others,” and as a rhetorical strategy to recruit and sustain their own membership. In this paper we undertake this analysis, exploring the rural origins of the militia movement, its social composition, ideology, and organization, and its articulation with other white supremacist groups. We argue that their vision of masculinity, particularly a self‐reliant, self‐made masculinity endemic to American history, is the theme unifying both the ideology and the organization of rural militias with the militant right‐wing continuum of which they are only a part.     

British Rule and African Civilization in Tanganyika

Abstract This paper examines the systematization of the ideology of African civilization in Tanganyika between the wars, in the context of colonial strategies of Indirect Rule. It shows that largely fictitious images of African history, tradition, social structure and culture were developed in an attempt to co-opt elements of the colonized, against the background of widespread resistance to colonialism and a pervasive post-World War I crisis of the 'civilizing mission'. Administrators. missionaries, social scientists and others contributed to this ideology of 'Africanity'. Attention is also drawn to the striking parallels between aspects of African civilization and post-1967 African socialism, and the suggestion made that the connecting link lies in African intellectuals from the 1930s embracing notions of African civilization to deal with the contradictions of their own position in colonial Tanganyika.
History has to be rewritten in each generation, because although the past does not change the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past, and finds new areas of sympathy as it relives different aspects of the experience of its predecessors.     

Civility and Humiliation under the French Flag: The Tensions of Colonial Liberalism in Pondicherry, 1871–86

This article explores the extension of political “liberty” and franchise – as well as the eventual extension of citizenship rights – to Indians during the decades of France's Third Republic (1870s–80s) in French colonial India. Not only does this example stand in stark contrast to the civil position of Indians in British India at the time, but it was also something of a unique situation in the French colonial world. How did the French attempt to apply a colonial policy of liberalism to Indian communities in Pondicherry, India, whose social world was constructed upon caste‐based rituals and rules? I argue that liberal policies that could violate caste rules concerning purity and lead to the loss of communal rights cannot be assessed without understanding how they were received and instrumentalized by the Indian population. Overall, the difficulty of transplanting liberalism in Pondicherry was not due just to the opposition of colonial society, but also due to the resistance of local Indians. Rejections of a more emancipatory agenda meant that the republican “civility” of liberty, equality and fraternity was compromised, and this illustrates one of the fundamental tensions in imperial/liberal discourse at the time.     

German seafarers,anti‐fascism and the anti‐Stalinist left: the ‘Antwerp Group’ and Edo Fimmen's International Transport Workers' Federation, 1933–40

Between the mid‐1930s and the beginning of the Second World War, a group of German seamen based in Antwerp combined with Amsterdam‐based Edo Fimmen, secretary of the International Transport Workers' Federation, to wage a campaign against the Nazi government among the sailors of the German merchant fleet. They organized cells of supporters on German ships, encouraged informal resistance, circulated propaganda and planned sabotage. The Antwerp Group was a breakaway from the Comintern‐aligned International of Seafarers and Harbour Workers (ISH). The Antwerp men were reacting against the ineffectiveness of the response of the German communist leadership to Hitler's takeover of power, and against the growing subordination of the ISH to Soviet interests. By highlighting the role of anti‐Stalinist militants in the anti‐fascism of the 1930s, the article contributes to the recent scholarship on anti‐fascism – a scholarship that has tended to emphasize the transnationalism and ideological diversity of anti‐fascism, rather than seeing it in national terms, or as a monolithic entity controlled by Moscow.     

"Occupation" and the Movement of People within the Japanese Empire: An Exploration of Migration between the Japanese Southern Frontier and Colonial Taiwan, the 1920s−1930s

Abstract:  Although there have been few studies on Yaeyama (the southern end of Ryukyu Archipelago) locals' migration during the pre Asia-Pacific period, a significant number of people went from there to colonial Taiwan, in particular during the 1920s and 1930s. In this paper, I discuss why many locals of Yaeyama worked in colonial Taiwan by analysing narratives of former migrants in autobiographies and my own interview research. First, this paper demonstrates how Yaeyama locals' attitudes to "work" and "occupation" were converted into more modern attitudes between the 1900s and the 1920s. Yaeyama locals often mention there being "no jobs" in their home islands, which justified their decision to go to Taiwan; but the discourse of "unemployment" should not be understood as a mere reflection of Yaeyama's economic condition, but also as a mark of change in people's attitude to the world. Since "work" and "occupation" are not just a matter of economic necessity, it could be said that Yaeyama locals searched for jobs in Taiwan not strictly in terms of economic profitability. Yaeyama locals went to colonial Taiwan, in search of "employment"; this action was closely associated with a financial motive, but it also implies development of self-worth as a social being. Although Yaeyama locals in Taiwan sometimes suffered ethnic discrimination from Japan proper, they were usually treated better than Taiwanese; Colonial Taiwan was an attractive destination to Yaeyama locals not only because Taiwan was more affluent and modernized, but also there were more opportunities for them to achieve social promotion in the context of the Japanese Empire.     

The Missing Memory of Canadian Sociology: Reflexive Government and “the Social Science”

The modest literature on the history of Canadian Sociology takes the appearance of a named academic discipline as its object. Canadian Sociology is held to have had some precursors in the 1880s, but really to appear only in the 1920s. It is described as a foreign import and as an activity first of intellectual speculation and moral reform. Observational and analytic practice are absent before 1880. The activities of state agents and government departments in the social field are not discussed. This article offers a richer account through an examination of the larger field from which Sociology was extracted, “the social science,” which was practiced actively in colonial Canada from the early nineteenth century. The social science shaped and was itself shaped by colonial conditions. The article outlines three interrelated moments in social science to carry its claims: inventory‐making, the emergence of “population‐thinking,” and “reflexive government.” Attending to the social science underlines the complex and convoluted relations of sociology with state power. Les rares oeuvrages académiques portant sur l'histoire de la sociologie canadienne prend pour objet l'apparition du terme <sociologie> dans le contexte universitaire. Dans cet optique, ils signalent certains précurseurs de la sociologie canadienne dès les années 1880, mais en fait ils affirment que cette discipline n'apparaît que dans les années 1920. Cette discipline est présentée comme une importation académique et, d'abord et avant tout, comme de la spéculation intellectuelle et comme un projet de réforme morale. D'après cette vision, les pratiques d'observation et d'analyse sociales ne semblent pas exister avant 1880, et les acteurs politiques et administratifs sont absents du terrain. Notre article propose un examen plus riche du vaste champ duquel la sociologie académique fut arrachée: <la science sociale> activement pratiquée au Canada à l'époque coloniale dès le début du XIXe siècle. La science sociale forma et fut formée par les conditions sociales et politiques existant dans la colonie. Notre article expose trois moments pertinents et inter‐reliés de la science sociale: la fabrication d'inventaires sociaux; l'émergence du <penser population>, et l'exercice du <gouvernement réflexif>. La réintégration de l'histoire de la sociologie canadienne dans la science sociale accentue la relation complexe et incontournable entre sociologie et pouvoir étatique.     

Making Coolies, (Un)making Workers: “Globalizing” Labour in the Late‐19th and Early‐20th Centuries

This paper explores the social relationships of wage labour formed or stabilized in British merchant shipping in the course of “off‐shoring” employment in the late‐19^th century. It argues that Asian wage‐workers were mobilized for employment on British merchant vessels as “coolies”, i.e. nominally free but mediated labouring subjects who could only be stabilized through legal, penal, social, debt, or other forms of coercion. Once introduced “coolie” relations were not confined to Indian crews. They also affected wage labour relations more generally in British shipping. While occurring against the backdrop of anti‐colonial struggles, the seafaring coolie's transformation into maritime worker was closely mediated by employers and the colonial state and produced hybrid outcomes. The creation of the modern seafaring “coolie” and the nature and context of his transformation into a “worker” thus shed interesting light on wage labour relations in the modern and contemporary global economy.     

"When Australia was the Big Name for Papua New Guinea": the Colonial Constitution of Faiwolmin Subjects

Abstract This essay addresses the constitution of colonial state subjects among Faiwolmin people of the Western Province, Papua New Guinea. As Australian power was consolidated here beginning in the 1950s, a relatively liberal, paternalistic colonialism encountered problems of containment and control on a historical and geographical penumbra of Empire. The process of bringing highly mobile and scattered shifting cultivators within the borders of the Territory was plagued by a shortage of "patrol" officers and technologies of indirect rule. This analysis is concerned with the consolidation of Australian colonial power and with how Faiwolmin became subjects, and their "customs" increasingly objects, of rule. By the time of nation state formation in 1975, it is argued, the subjectivities of Faiwolmin themselves had been reconstituted within a new terrain of conflict introduced by the imperial power.     

“No Thanks,We’re Full”: Individual Characteristics,National Context,and Changing Attitudes Toward Immigration1

In this paper we examine how individual‐level characteristics and national context affect attitudes toward immigration. Although many previous studies have compared attitudes toward immigration across countries, little attention has been paid to how attitudes may be affected by changes within a country over time. We take advantage of seventeen national Canadian Gallup surveys to consider how differences in national economic conditions and changing immigration flows affect attitudes and changes in attitudes between 1975 and 2000. While the state of the national economy affects attitudes this is not the case for the rate of immigration. Rather than affecting some groups more than others the state of the economy has a relatively uniform effect across groups. Our results also show that far from being a continuum, being anti‐immigration and being pro‐immigration are qualitatively different. Interest, ideology, and the national economy affect anti‐immigration sentiments, but only ideology affects pro‐immigration sentiments.     

Transnational connections and anti‐colonial radicalism in the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, 1946

In this article, I explore the spatial politics of the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946 and call for a more maritime sense of ‘the political’. The RIN only existed from 1934 to 1950; it became the Indian Navy after independence. Its mutiny in 1946, which was caused by a number of grievances from anticolonial nationalism to more mundane challenges about the standard of food, continues to be the dominant event in this history. Leela Gandhi (2014) used the RIN mutiny to challenge the binary distinction between elite and subaltern in much Indian historiography by depicting it as an ‘anti‐colonial counterpublic’, or space in which discourses other than the dominant nationalist framings of independence were mobilized. She also regards the mutiny as a potential example of inconsequential ethics in which, instead of worrying about its causes, the mutiny can be read as an experimental space in which democratic politics occurred, rather than one in which people were striving for a ‘successful’ outcome. I argue that, while there is much to be admired in Gandhi's reading of these events, she discounts the maritime nature of the RIN mutiny. In other words, she fails to acknowledge that travelling to different international locations allowed the sailors to learn about democracy and other ideas, which in turn influenced their beliefs about what the future of India, and the RIN, should look like. As a result, I argue for the need to explore in greater depth the important connections that exist between anti‐colonialism, democratic politics and the naval/maritime experience.     

Christ vs. Communism: Communism as a Religious Social Problem in Finland's Proto‐Fascist Lapua Movement in the 1930s

This article traces the emergence of religious anti‐communist discourse in Finland's proto‐fascist Lapua Movement in the 1930s. Applying constructionist social problems theory, it discusses the constructions of communism as a religious social problem, Christian piety as a solution to the problem of godless communism, and the religious legitimation of violence. The article argues that by identifying Christianity with the Finnish nation the construction of communism as a religious problem—itself an outcome of the influence of revivalist Lutheran ministers in the leadership of the movement—resonated with the broader audience, but that this indigenous religious nationalism lost support with the increasing belligerence of the movement.     

Introductory editorial

One of the results of the policies pursued by the Japanese colonial administration in Korea after 1910 was the migration of large numbers of Koreans to Japan. Hostility and prejudice toward these immigrants were fostered not only by the willingness of Korean workers to accept working and living conditions far below those which their Japanese counterparts would tolerate, but also by the association of Koreans with radical ideologies.

This hostility was given its fullest expression immediately after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 when large numbers of Koreans were put to death by members of the army, police, and local ‘vigilance associations’. An attempt is made here not only to describe the events which followed the earthquake, but also to show how these were an inevitable consequence of Japanese colonial rule.     

Responding to Empire: Liberal Nationalism and Imperial Decline in Scotland and Québec1

Abstract This article emphasises the role of empire in explaining the emergence of “liberal nationalism” in Scotland and Québec in the early twentieth century. That period witnessed a relative decline in the British Empire's geopolitical standing. In response British governments implemented policies which sought to redress its decline. The article focuses on three policies – the South African War, tariff reform and imperial defence – and the response of the Young Scots' Society and the self‐ascribed Nationalistes. Both groups espoused a “liberal nationalism”. Yet their liberal nationalism was expressed differently: emphasis was placed on “liberal” in Scotland, and on “nationalism” in Québec, reflecting contrasting relationships with empire.     

Publishing postcolonial Africa: Nigeria and Ekeh’s two publics a generation after

This paper interrogates Peter Ekeh’s “two publics” in Africa in the context of African studies. It argues that what Ekeh analysed was a society in transition. Thirty-eight years after Ekeh’s publication, also using a Nigerian case study, the “attacks” on the “civil public” which Ekeh theorised, are suggested to have extended to the “primordial public”: amorality is presently ubiquitous in the “two publics.” The paper identifies a combination of three elements pushing the “attack”: military rule, a civil war and enormous resource from mineral oil (oil boom). Furthermore, the paper suggests that “two publics” evolved largely because before colonialism, there was no hegemony built in any known “state” in what was Nigeria at the time to sustain any common (moral) value system that could have resisted the “civilising” ideology of colonialism. The paper underscores the fact that knowledge production in African studies has not paid sufficient attention to the gap created in nation building in Africa because of the inability of pre-colonial African states to establish hegemony which is critical in state and nation building in other civilisations. In conclusion, the paper argues that the inability to build hegemonic order before colonial rule, not only in Nigeria, but in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa largely explains why 50 years after colonial rule, there may still be debate about and delay in resolving the problem of the “two publics.”     

Double binding of Japanese colonialism: trajectories of baseball in Japan,Taiwan, and Korea†

This study explores the historic implications of baseball within the larger processes of constructing modernity under Japanese colonialism by examining the game's regional trajectory, with a focus on its introduction and proliferation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although baseball was initially introduced into the region as a symbol of American modernity, it was spread and popularized by Imperial Japan. By examining the ways that baseball was received and appropriated in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea, this study demonstrates that its trajectory reflects not only colonization by both the USA and Japan but resistance that amounted to a double de-colonization against both of these entities. The term ‘double binding’ is heuristically used to illustrate both Japanese imperialism and postcolonial consciousness in its (former) colonies, in which the USA and Japan functioned as a pair of modernizing/imperial forces and as the objects of de-colonization.