{"title":"A Fugitive Christian Public: Singing, Sentiment, and Socialization in Colonial Korea","authors":"H. Chang","doi":"10.1215/07311613-8551992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07311613-8551992","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Well-known songs of colonial Korea such as \"Kagop'a\" and \"Pongsŏnhwa\" appear to be secular songs, but their origins lie in the complex intersection of North American Christian missions, Korean cultural life, and Japanese colonial rule. This article explores the historical significance of secular sentimental songs in colonial Korea (1910–45), which originated in mission schools and churches. At these sites North American missionaries and Christian Koreans converged around songwriting, song publishing, and vocal performance. Missionary music editors such as Annie Baird, Louise Becker, and their Korean associates relied on secular sentimental songs to cultivate a new kind of psychological interior associated with a modern subjectivity. An examination of representative vernacular song collections alongside accounts of social connections formed through musical activities gives a glimpse into an intimate space of a new religion in which social relations and subjective interiors were both mediated and represented by songs. The author argues that this space was partly formed by Christianity's fugitive status in the 1910s under the uncertainty of an emergent colonial rule and traces the genealogy of Korean vernacular modernity to the activities of singing in this space, which she calls a fugitive Christian public.","PeriodicalId":43322,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Korean Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42132568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea: Virtual Mothering by Hosu Kim (review)","authors":"S. Bae","doi":"10.1215/07311613-8552084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07311613-8552084","url":null,"abstract":"Research within adoption studies initially focused primarily on the practice of adoption and its outcomes. The scholars producing early adoption-related research, mostly within the disciplines of social work and psychology, were often adoption social workers or adoptive parents themselves. As a response to research that seemed to replicate power differentials across the “adoption constellation,” critical adoption scholars have instead produced scholarship that reveals the structural and social processes embedded in its practice. Using interdisciplinary approaches from feminist, postcolonial, geopolitical, biopolitical, critical race, and queer theory, critical adoption scholars have sought to complicate widely accepted notions of family, kinship, race, identity, humanitarianism, citizenship, and transnationalism. From within this emergent field of study, Hosu Kim’s book Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea: Virtual Mothering importantly fills a glaring void. Although notable scholarship within the field has illuminated the geopolitics, structural inequalities, and gendered violence that render children adoptable, and has given a voice to the lived experiences of those adopted, there was a lack of scholastic inquiry on birth mothers. Kim’s “discursive-material-affective” (15) examination of four different sites— maternity homes, television search-and-reunion shows, a birth mothers’ internet forum, and an oral history collection—breaks new ground, challenging what she calls the “two divergent figures” (3) of birth mothers in South Korea. Although her research outlines the processes by which birth mothers become both legally erased and socially dead, citing Foucault’s heterotopia, Kim cites","PeriodicalId":43322,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Korean Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48390603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Queer Thresholds of Heresy","authors":"J. Han","doi":"10.1215/07311613-8552058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07311613-8552058","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Disputes over heresy are not new or uncommon, as mainline Protestant denominations in South Korea have historically deemed numerous minor sects and radical theologies to be heretical to the Christian faith. However, when the largest evangelical denomination in the country, the Presbyterian Church in Korea (Hapdong), began investigating Reverend Lim Borah (Im Pora) of the Sumdol Hyanglin Church in 2017 and subsequently ruled her ministry to be heretical, they charted new grounds by denouncing LGBTI-affirming theology and ministry as heresy. This article traces the semantic ambiguity and politics of the term for heresy, idan, and highlights the intersection of heretical Christianity, gender and sexual nonconformity, and ideological dissidence. The argument is that growing interests in queer theology and calls for LGBTI-affirming ministry stoked the flames of efforts by beleaguered Protestant denominations to use heresy to discredit and stigmatize dissident practices, and that rather than simply stifle dissent, the subsequent controversy also exposed the limits of dominant power and the contours of vital resistance.","PeriodicalId":43322,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Korean Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49523581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea","authors":"Ksenia Chizhova","doi":"10.1215/07311613-8552097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07311613-8552097","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43322,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Korean Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45309501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Sacred and the Secular: Protestant Christianity as Lived Experience in Modern Korea: An Introduction","authors":"Hyaeweol Choi","doi":"10.1215/07311613-8551979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07311613-8551979","url":null,"abstract":"According to Statistics Korea, in 2015 the number of South Koreans identifying as Protestant Christians was 9,675,761 (19.7 percent of the population), making Protestantism the most popular religion in the country. Buddhism ranked second, with 7,619,332 (15.5 percent). These results are particularly eye-opening when one considers that Buddhism was introduced into Korea in the fourth century and has been a significant religious tradition in Korea for centuries, while Protestant Christianity was introduced only in the late nineteenth century. One may note other signs of the dramatic success of Protestant Christianity in South Korea. A series of gargantuan evangelistic campaigns—most representatively “Thirty Million to Christ” (1953–69), “Korea ’73 Billy Graham Crusade,” “Expo ’74,” “’77 Holy Assembly for the Evangelization of the Nation,” and “World Evangelization Crusades” in the 1980s—mobilized millions of Christian adherents. Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is the site of eighteen megachurches, including the world’s largest megachurch, Yoido Full Gospel Church, with a membership of approximately 800,000. Further, in 1999 “Korean Protestant churches commissioned more missionaries than did any other national church except the United States,” and thus South Korea took a prominent role in global Christianity. In fact, some Korean Christian missionaries, represented by the University Bible Fellowship, target white Americans for conversion, reversing the conventional direction of evangelical activities, which had been dominated by white Western missionaries targeting nonwhite, colonized subjects.","PeriodicalId":43322,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Korean Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48904545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Reverend on Trial: Debating the Proper Place of Christianity in the North Korean Revolution","authors":"Sandra H. Park","doi":"10.1215/07311613-8552045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07311613-8552045","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:As the early North Korean state (1945–50) sought to groom \"proper\" revolutionary subjects, many Christian leaders publicly confronted the state. When Presbyterian minister Cho Ponghwan upset revolutionary sensibilities with political commentaries during an evangelical circuit around Hwanghae Province, the people's courts tried him as a reactionary. This article draws on surviving court records in the North Korean Captured Documents collection to elucidate the pedagogic aims that the state invested into Cho's trial. Instead of dismissing the people's courtroom as revolutionary excess, I engage Cho's trial as an intelligible debate over early North Korea's secularizing project. Beyond discipline, I demonstrate that the state laboriously instructed Christians on embodying desire for the revolution and refraining from transgressing the state-drawn boundary between religion and politics. Yet, due to the instability of this boundary, the courts also used Cho's trial to articulate and assert the state's sole authority over defining and redefining this boundary as a way to manage the sacred in North Korean society. Reading along and against the state's pen, this article excavates the North Korean people's court as a crucial site for ironing out the state pedagogy on the reactionary and the sacred in a postcolonial, socialist revolution.","PeriodicalId":43322,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Korean Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45526500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Designing Secularity at Sarang Church","authors":"H. Lehto","doi":"10.1215/07311613-8552071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07311613-8552071","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Sarang Global Ministry Center (SGMC) in Seoul, South Korea, is well known for its architectural design and for several controversies surrounding its construction. The SGMC does not have conventional Christian architectural features, such as a steeple or stone facade; instead, the church resembles a luxury department store. Reactions to this building have been mixed, reflecting differing opinions about Christianity in South Korea. Some value the fact that the building's aesthetics blend Christian activities with everyday life outside the church. Others criticize the building's corporate appearance, citing it as evidence that Sarang Church is \"just a business.\" While the way religion is permitted to operate in South Korean secular society is partially defined by legal principles, such as the separation of church and state and state neutrality toward religion, secularism also entails an active configuration of the social order through lived experience. Secularity both constitutes and is constituted by the materiality of religious space, which disputes over the SGMC design make clear. Considering varied responses to the SGMC building project, this article highlights how church architecture, city planning, and consumer capitalism participate in the shaping of Korean Protestant Christianity and how it manifests within South Korea's secular social and political order.","PeriodicalId":43322,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Korean Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47466540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature","authors":"Yoon Sun Yang","doi":"10.4324/9781315622811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315622811","url":null,"abstract":"in multiple and divided national and ethnonational literary fields in the region; a postcolonial and post–Cold War remapping of his life and works as a case study may open a window into illuminating how certain historical figures are remembered and forgotten in different contexts in the divided postcolonial and post–Cold War afterlives in the Asia-Pacific. As an exploration into these larger concerns, this chapter considers the significance of the forgotten figure of the translator that repeatedly haunted Kim’s oeuvre.","PeriodicalId":43322,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Korean Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42838791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Eating Korean in America: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity","authors":"Seungsook Moon","doi":"10.1215/07311613-7932363","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07311613-7932363","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43322,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Korean Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42877293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Temporalities of Tonghak: Eschatology, Rebellion, and Civilization","authors":"Seungyop Shin","doi":"10.1215/07311613-7932246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07311613-7932246","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines how the ideological orientations of the Tonghak religion, particularly the eschatological vision of time, empowered its practitioners and peasants to imagine a new world and act out their faith. By paying attention to the notion of kaebyŏk, I explore how different temporalities—redemptive time, now-time, and progressive time—played a significant role in the Tonghak movement from its formation through its reconfiguration as Ch'ŏndogyo. In the shifting geopolitics of East Asia at the turn of the twentieth century, Tonghak emerged as a dissonant theology whose prediction of an apocalyptic upheaval of the universe was discordant with the conceptions of time dominant in both traditional Chosŏn and modern Korea. Viewing history as cyclical, the Tonghak founders conceptualized kaebyŏk as an unexpected critical event that could happen in an abrupt, ever-present now. This unique temporal consciousness underpinned the revolutionary characteristics of Tonghak thought and laid the foundation for its followers to manifest their aspirations for social change through a massive uprising at now-time. Yet Tonghak's theoretical agenda gradually lost its revolutionary edge during the modernization of the church. By adopting ideologies of civilization and enlightenment as well as social Darwinism, Ch'ŏndogyo focused on the self-cultivating role that kaebyŏk played within the progressive vision of time.","PeriodicalId":43322,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Korean Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48153410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}