Victorian Humanity in Colonial Korea, Where Asians Did Not See Themselves as the Other

This article reconsiders the racial hierarchies rendering the nonwhite race as the Other in Anglo-American Victorian studies by examining the case of colonial Korea, where both the colonizer and the colonized were people of color. In colonial Korea, reading Victorian and Edwardian literature enabled Koreans to find an alternative humanity beyond the imperial Japanese modernity that stigmatized them. I briefly review how Asian critics located in colonial Korea read Samuel Smiles's Self-Help and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. I suggest that their findings included the idea of humanity as a liberal, autonomous self and an environmental subject, both of which challenge the Japanese imposition of modern citizenship named as hwang-gook-shin-min (皇國臣民). I argue that such a response to Victorian literature from a locational perspective not affected by the hierarchical binaries of race or empire suggests that we as contemporary Victorianists (located around the globe) consider “transimperial” solidarity to explore a connection with others outside our immediate national community regardless of racial difference. It also urges us to promote “planetarity” in our reading to embrace willful dislocation accepting heterogeneous locationalities against homogenizing globalization.