Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways: Seoul-California Series in Korean Studies, Volume 1
... In the teachings of Confucius, the family has a special place and is a social institution that requires special attention as a special foundation of society. If in Buddhism all the rules of the family consist of the "Five Rules" [1,[2][3][4], in Confucianism the morality of the family forms a whole system of obligations and procedures. Buddhist priests intervene in family life in two main ways: the adoption of a family member into a religious sect and the mourning ceremony. ...
... All other family ceremonies and traditions are performed based on the people's own values and customs. There are no significant differences between the rights and duties of women and men in the family [2,[3][4][5][6][7]. However, when the new Confucianism gained the status of a state ideology, its influence became apparent in the family, along with other areas that were Нашр санаси: 29.08.2020 ...
All religions have a system of rules governing the family. In Islam, family law is called odat, and women's rights are strictly protected, while in Hinduism, books describing Hindu religions such as the Arthashastra and the Dharmashastra show that there is a system of rules that encourages a woman to obey her husband in any situation. This article focuses on family law in Korea during the Choson Dynasty, examining the impact of Confucianism on family procedures and its main differences from Buddhism, as well as issues related to divorce.
... Thus, Cho (1996) spoke of the two sides of Confucian patriarchy in Korea that simultaneously empower mothers and suppress female autonomy so as to accommodate women within a male-dominated system. Choi (2009b) also argued that, while the "wise mother and good wife" ideology is certainly oppressive in many respects, it is also liberating in the sense that it creates a circumscribed domain in which women exercise power. ...
... 26 Another women's studies scholar, Hyaeweol Choi, however, complicates Kang's portrayal of missionary women as pioneering feminists straying from Victorian womanhood by claiming that women missionaries-who were viewed as "modern" by Koreans-were, in reality, women who "cherished the Victorian notion of true womanhood that valued religious piety and domesticity and held unfavorable perceptions of the suffrage movement and the phenomenon of [the New Woman] in the West." 27 While demonstrating how missionaries "de-oriented gender" for their Christian goals, 28 Choi provides a nuanced approach to the complicated nexus between Christianity and feminism in Chosŏn Korea. Notwithstanding Western women missionaries' conceivable conservatism, there is no doubt that mission schools, along with academic institutions established by Koreans, played important roles in providing Korean women access to education and that such schools subsequently facilitated the emergence of progressive New Woman advocates, what Hyaeweol Choi calls "the liberal feminist group" of Korea. ...
... Christianity cultivated a national consciousness among Koreans (both elite and commoners alike) -through teaching the Bible in Korean at the grassroot level, involving the Bible Women (Strawn, 2012); transmitting Western knowledge directly to Koreans regardless of social class and gender (Choi, 2009) ) -an esteemed Korean Christian ethnonationalist thinker (and one of Asia's most important voices for democracy and non-violence during the twentieth century, often called the "Gandhi of Korea") interpreted the sufferings of Korea with the biblical analogies. 4 The modern press such as Koreans under Japanese colonial rule had no freedom of assembly or media to convey the will of the people. ...
Modern universities have largely been portrayed in the literature as an extension of nation building projects, focusing on the state as primary actor. This article challenges such presuppositions by separating ‘nation’ and ‘state’ and with a critical appropriation of diasporic subjectivity and institutions from a comparative historical perspective. The article has four themes: ‘diaspora’, ‘ethnic internationalism’, ‘stateless nations’ and ‘internationalisation’ in higher education (IHE). It illustrates these themes and their interrelationships by considering Koreans in the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945) and Jews during the British Mandate for Palestine (1920–1948) and construing them as stateless nations. These two historical cases illustrate how higher education was linked to ethnonational diasporas and internationalisation in the absence of a supportive state apparatus. The paradox is that ethnic nationalism was not only compatible but often overlapped with ethnic internationalism in higher education. The conclusion of this comparative study suggests the implications for the twenty-first century and the important role of diaspora in processes of IHE then and now.
... 91, 124). Hyaeweol Choi argues that there was continuity between Confucianism and Christianity, because both attempted to locate women mainly in the domestic sphere, and she characterizes the Christian ideology as "divine domesticity" (Choi 2009;Choi and Jolly 2014). Modernity is a narrative term rather than a theoretical concept, according to Jameson (2013). ...
This study explores the relationship between Christian education and the construction of female gentility in East Asia around the turn of the twentieth century. Because American missionary schools played an important role in the region, notions of female gentility were greatly influenced by the cultural values of the American middle class and, more specifically, American liberal arts colleges. The notion of the “new gentlewoman” helps to illuminate modern Protestant womanhood’s ambiguous relationship with feminism and nationalism. Recognizing that the Protestant notion of “female gentility” was internally racialized, in this study, I also pay attention to the question of race. While the scope of my research spans East Asia, in this paper, I examine Christian education in China, focusing specifically on Yenching Women’s College. I compare the college’s educational goals and curricula to the pedagogy at the male college of Yenching, the governmental women’s college, and other female colleges in Japan and Korea. In this study, I approach East Asia as a whole for several reasons: first, because a broader view of the region helps put the Chinese case into perspective; second, because the region was often dealt with together in missionary work; and lastly, because national differences cannot be assumed to be more substantial than other differences, such as those based on gender, class, generation, period, and province.
... The three bonds confirm the hierarchy of authority: the ruler over minister; father over son; and husband over wife (Li 2000: 14). This ideology includes the notions of 男尊女卑, namjon yobi ('men should be respected whilst women are belittled') and 男女有別, namnyo yubyul ('men and women are in different positions'), which requires obedience by women to their father, husband and son (Choi 2009: 14, [in] Park 2016. ...
This paper is an investigation how cultural perception could be embedded in language and literature and how this helps different analyses on a same historical event. The article includes the comparison between a work of classical Korean literature, Hanjungnok (한중록), and an English-translated version of it, The Memoirs of Lady Hyekyŏng, translated by Kim-Haboush, and a work of a British novel, The Red Queen, written by Margaret Drabble. The comparison is to explore the language use regarding a perception of family relations and of gender in each version of writing. This paper concludes that authors’ and audience’s language and cultural background would influence on perceiving and analysing literature and its context so that each interpretation could be differentiated, even with the actual historical event.
In the early 20th century, Korean women began to manifest themselves in the public sphere. Sung Un Gang explores how the women's gaze was reimagined in public discourse as they attended plays and movies, delving into the complex negotiation process surrounding women's public presence. In this first extensive study of Korean female spectators in the colonial era, he analyzes newspapers, magazines, fictions, and images, arguing that public discourse aimed to mold them into a male-driven and top-down modernization project. Through a meticulous examination of historical sources, this study reconceptualizes colonial Korean female spectators as diverse, active agents with their own politics who played a crucial role in shaping colonial publicness.
This paper aims to examine the life, experiences, and limitation of Ch’oe Yŏngsuk, a notable New Woman figure subjected to colonial restrictions in Korea during the early 20th century, with empirical resources, including newly discovered archives from the Swedish National Archive and the Sigtunastiftelsen archive. While Korean women were able to receive a modern education from the late 19th century, Ch’oe studied in Shanghai and then went to Sweden in 1926 to study sociology, becoming the first Korean woman to receive a bachelor’s degree in Economics. After her studies, she traveled extensively and met influential people. Despite her notable achievements, Ch’oe could not find a proper job and died in poverty a few months after her return. This paper seeks to shed light on her life during her stay in Sweden and her activities in the independence and feminist movements there. The relationship between her ‘failure’ after returning home and the constraints of the time, given spatially/periodically and gender-wise, will also be examined. It is also worth noting that her case is a symbolic example of the social constraints that elite women had to face at the time. Her contrasting activities and evaluations in Sweden and Korea show how constrained and suppressed a woman’s life is by the time and space in which it positions.
Zusammenfassung
Diese Arbeit untersucht, warum in den 1920er-Jahren eine mediale Diskussion über den Kinobesuch koreanischer Schulmädchen ausgelöst wurde und inwiefern diese mit dem Spannungsverhältnis zwischen romantischer Liebe und der eugenischen Bewegung im kolonialen Korea zusammenhing. Mittels historischer Diskursanalyse identifiziert diese Arbeit die filmische Darstellung der romantischen Liebe, die Sorge über ihre affektive Kraft auf die Jugendlichen und die Einflüsse der Eugenik als maßgeblichen Bezugsrahmen der Debatte. Während die koreanischen Jugendlichen Filme als ein Referenzsystem für ihre eigene Praxis der „absoluten Liebe“ nutzten, versuchten die Eugeniker*innen, ihre Sexualität im Sinne der „Rassenverbesserung und des Wohls des Staates“ zu regulieren. Die Koreanische Eugenische Vereinigung (KEV) fokussierte sich auf die Realisierung der sogenannten „eugenischen Ehe“ durch die Prävention von Geschlechtskrankheiten und riet Frauen, Männern ohne Geschlechtskrankheiten zu heiraten und sich um die sexuelle Gesundheit ihrer Ehemänner zu kümmern. Ferner wurden Kinobesuche während der Schwangerschaft als Risiko für die ungeborenen Kinder erklärt, weil sie auf die körperliche Gesundheit sowie Psychohygiene der Mütter negative Einflüsse haben könnten. Frauen, die sexuelle Dienstleistungen anboten, galten als Infektionsrisiko. Diese Arbeit stellt fest, dass der koreanische eugenische Diskurs der 1920er- und 1930er-Jahre geschlechts- und schichtspezifisch ablief und die Körper und Sexualität der jungen Frauen zu kontrollieren versuchte.
This article explores the Christian efforts to modernize rural women, who were placed at the center of rural reform in Republican China in the 1920s. Rural women represented an important, untapped force for change in rural communities. The Christian magazine Nü xing 女星 (Woman’s Star), launched in 1932, reached out to this group. Through a new model of rural womanhood, a figure called Mrs. Wang, the magazine demonstrated how rural women could transform local communities through domesticity and Christian faith. The modern model of rural womanhood promoted by Nü xing emerged as a part of a global Christian movement in which creating Christian households was the primary goal. The magazine thus represents the integration of a marginalized group of women into a global community founded on shared domestic concerns and spiritual practices. Nü xing reveals how rural women, as historical agents of change, were connected to rural reform and nation-building in China and to a global collective of Christian domestic womanhood.
A hybrid identity, which results from an amalgamation of different cultures, different religious traditions and ideologies, and different social locations, with each having varying degrees of importance for identity formation, and being more or less well defined, has been a feature of Jewish and Christian life since biblical times. This article explores a variety of processes of hybridization in the formation of Christian identity. It also describes different effects that the condition of hybridity can have on Christian experience. Finally, it raises the question of whether hybridity should not be simply normal but also in some way normative in the religious self-understanding of Christians.
The issue of women's rights has become a topic of focus in all societies striving for democracy today. International cooperation on gender relations and equality in them will have a positive effect on improving the social status of women and their free exercise of their rights, their place in public administration, science, economics and other areas. Uzbekistan and the Republic of Korea are two countries that have entered a new phase of economic, political, cultural and international cooperation in all areas. An important aspect of this cooperation is the role of Uzbek and Korean women in interstate cooperation. The following is a brief analysis of the historical roots of the current socio-political and economic situation of women in both countries.
This article examines how Anglo-American evangelicals in colonial Korea employed racialized understandings of the environment to justify a culture of recreation and health. In the metropole and periphery, missionary researchers studying climate, geography, and public health asserted a science-based injunction to rest that was intended to maintain a population of evangelical workers. The production of this scientific research, external to the Japanese colonial state, allowed the missionary community to establish a rationale for collective segregation from the local populations they sought to save. In Korea, this dynamic is profiled through the history of a missionary resort at Sorai beach. Initially believed to have contributed to the suicide of an evangelical worker in 1895, within a few years the Sorai area rapidly transformed. In step with the broader culture of summer recreation that emerged in Korea during the 1910s and 1920s, the missionaries recast Sorai from a deleterious space into a site of strategic and devotional rest.
Kim Iryŏp (Kim Wŏnju, 1896‒1971) was a pioneering feminist and prolific writer who left lay life to become a Buddhist nun. The bifurcation of her life between the secular and religious has generated two separate narratives, with Korean feminist studies focusing on Iryŏp as a revolutionary thinker and Buddhist studies centering on Iryŏp as an influential Buddhist nun. When divided this way, the biography of each career reads more simply. However, by including two significant but unexplored pieces of her history that traverse the two halves of her narrative, Iryŏp emerges as a more complex figure. The first is her forty-five-year relationship with the Buddhist monk Paek Sŏng’uk (1897‒1981). The second is how she extended some of her early feminism into monastic life but said little about the marginalization of nuns in Buddhism’s highly patriarchal system. In both her relationship with Paek and her feminism, Iryŏp drew on the Buddhist teaching of nonself, in which the “big I” is beyond gender. Thus, Iryŏp repositions herself as having attained big I, while Paek remained stuck in “small I.” Yet, while she finds equality with monks through an androgynous big I, none of her writings contest Korean Buddhism’s androcentric institutional structure.
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.
Korean Christianity has produced an exceptionally large number of martyrs. At the same time, this phenomenon is marked by joyful witness in Korea and in other parts of the world. This article explores some of the key stages in the early growth of Korean Protestant Christianity from the perspective of joy: the evangelists in the 1880s, the revival movements in the early 1900s, and the sending of the first Korean missionaries. These examples show that Christian mission was understood more as the natural and joyful outcome of being in Christ than as a duty and command.
Few Anglophone rhetoric studies have explored how colonial environments affected the work of American-supported schools and performances. Korea’s first women’s college, however, used hybrid Korean, American, and Christian cultural references in the pageantry, visuals, and music of its 1930 May Day to negotiate Japanese colonization. These May Day “performative educational rhetorics” acknowledged colonial authority while resisting Japanese assimilation objectives until they were silenced during Japan’s Pacific War. Unlike American-operated schools in U.S. colonies and occupied territories, therefore, Japanese colonization rendered performances not only of Korean but also Christian and American identities as potentially subversive symbols of freedom.
In spite of American religious history’s increased attention to women, gender, and sexuality as central categories of study, the field has largely omitted narratives of Asian and Asian American women. Indeed, there is no single-authored monograph devoted to Asian American women’s religious history. This chapter explores approaches for filling this historiographical lacuna. To that end, it calls historians to take a deeper transpacific dive to uncover submerged narratives and to reconstruct the past with attention to interdisciplinarity.
This article offers a new perspective on the study of the discourse on superstition (mixin) in modern China. Drawing upon recent work on the import of the concept “superstition” to the colonial world during the 19th century, the article intervenes in the current study of the circulation of discursive constructs in area studies. This intervention is done in two ways: first, I identify how in the modern era missionaries and Western empires collaborated in linking anti-superstition thought to discourses on women’s liberation. Couched in promises of civilizational progress to cultures who free their women from backward superstitions, this historical connection between empire, gender and modern knowledge urges us to reorient our understanding of superstition merely as the ultimate other of “religion” or “science.” Second, in order to explore the nuances of the connection between gender and superstition, I turn to an archive that is currently understudied in the research on superstition in China. I propose that we mine modern Chinese literature by using literary methods. I demonstrate this proposal by reading China’s first feminist manifesto, The Women’s Bell by Jin Tianhe and the short story Medicine by Lu Xun.
This article uses the case of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in China to argue that disruptive cultural technologies—namely organizational forms and tools—were just as significant within Christian mission encounters as religious doctrines or material technologies. LMS missionaries did not convert as many Chinese to Christianity as they hoped, but their auxiliary efforts were more successful. The LMS mission project facilitated the transfer of certain cultural technologies such as church councils to administer local congregations or phonetic scripts to facilitate literacy. Once in the hands of native Christians and non-Christians alike, these cultural technologies could be freely adapted for a variety of purposes and ends that often diverged from the missionaries’ original intent and expectation. This article draws on the letters and reports of missionaries of the London Missionary Society in North China from roughly 1900 to 1930—the period during which self-governing Protestant congregations took root in China and many places around the world. The spread of church government structures and a culture of Bible-reading enabled Chinese within the mission sphere to create new forms of collective life. These new forms of community not only tied into local networks, but also connected to transnational flows of information, finances, and personnel. Native Christian communities embraced new, alternative sources of community authority—the power of God working through a group of ordinary people or through the biblical text—that proved both attractive and disruptive.
An overview of the history of religion in Korea from 1876-1910
Ethnological studies point to candidates for culturally universal and variable characteristics of romantic love models. However, only recently have these hypotheses begun to be tested through primary data collection intended for cross-cultural comparison. This study builds on two such efforts covering the United States, Russia, Lithuania, and China by adapting their methods to South Korea. We found support for the core features of romantic love identified in these studies (sexual attraction, altruism, intrusive thinking, emotional fulfillment, and idealization). We also explain peripheral meanings of love, including its association with sex, irrationality, and material considerations. In our discussion of East Asian models of romantic love, we argue that the apparently less altruistic attitudes of East Asian women toward their lovers are attributable to the deterioration of structural support for institutions that enforced the ideal of female sacrifice previously valorized in their family relations, and women’s backlash against these continued expectations.
Although East Asia is known for its production of fine silk fabrics and also as a major exporter of luxurious textiles, it gradually consumed European fabrics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Using extant costume and textile objects in the late nineteenth century, this essay introduces types of European woolen fabrics. Imported woolen fabrics in Japan, predominantly British in the beginning, were eventually being replaced by those produced in Australia and other parts of the world in the early twentieth century. Literary descriptions, news articles, advertising images, and fashion magazines are used as primary sources along with surviving uniforms and dresses. The manufacturing of woolen fabrics in Japan and Korea from the 1920s to the 1940s demonstrated how a foreign luxury became a necessity in a war-obsessed colonial government. Along with mass production of cotton, the making of woolen fabrics became part of an essential military enterprise and a monopoly of the Empire of Japan. This essay discusses how the intellectuals who had studied abroad and the social elite who had positions in public service adopted the fashionable styling of woolen clothing, and why this trend of hybrid dandyism continued after WWII in Korea and Japan.
Education has long been an interest of foreign missionaries. Many criticisms have been raised over the promotion of imperialism in foreign missionary education. However, what is often overlooked is the positive mutual impact foreign educators have had on both their host and home societies. This article explores the influence of early educational missionaries in Korea and considers the “other truth” of the positive impact they had as advocates for Koreans during the Japanese colonial period. After a historical overview, the authors highlight missionary contributions to social justice and the restoration of Korean national spirit. They conclude with implications for today.
South Korean Protestantism has attracted scholars for a number of reasons including its almost unrivaled numeric growth and vibrancy in East Asia. Recent observations, however, have also noticed its negative perceptions among the general public in Korea, including those who profess to be Protestants. This study focuses on movements by Protestant “critical insiders,” namely, those who are committed to their Protestant faiths yet are highly critical of the ways in which the Protestant religion is taught, believed, and practiced in South Korea. Such emphasis on resistance fits well the scholarly agenda of cultural studies. The subjects of observation in this study, however, can take the cultural studies orthodoxy and flip it on its head. In cultural studies, it has been asserted that unintended-creative readings of cultural—and religious—texts on the part of the readers indicate their resistive agency rather than subjugation. Korean Protestant critical insiders’ various activities pertaining to the Bible, however, entail reversing such observations about interpreting cultural texts and empowerment. Instead of turning the signs upside down, as typically celebrated in cultural studies, what they aspire to do is follow more radically the intended meanings/readings of the text. Rescuing the text, so to speak, is paramount for religiously loyal resistance.
This chapter examines the processes by which the ideologies of English have been shaped in the Korean context from historical perspectives. Since English first arrived in Korea in 1882, popular beliefs about English have been constructed by the interplays of multiple factors born out of particular domestic events, which are defined as follows: (1) The arrival of English in Korea (1882–1909); (2) Japanese colonialism (1910–1945); (3) Independence and American control (1945–1960); (4) Modernization of Korea (1961–1992); (5) Korea in the context of globalization (1993–2013). On the basis of Bourdieu’s theory of capital, the genealogy of English in Korea illustrates how English has served as multiple forms of valued capital – cultural, economic, social, and symbolic – in the local context, and has thus been feverishly pursued by upwardly mobile Koreans.
This chapter examines the socially constructed nature of linguistic insecurity with regard to neoliberal ideologies and English in Korean society. Specifically, it explores the pursuit of linguistic perfectionism as a form of neoliberal personhood among English-Korean translators and interpreters. Depending on their language learning backgrounds, the participants can be categorized into two groups: haewaepa (overseas learners of English) and guknaepa (domestic learners of English). While haewaepa (who have learned English in a naturalistic environment early in life) are generally legitimatized as superior language users compared to guknaepa, the over-idealization of haewaepa as “perfect” speakers of English as informed by neoliberalism serves as a source of anxiety and insecurity for the haewaepa participants. The same ideology that accentuates individual commitment to linguistic perfectionism also presents a challenge to guknaepa, who feel obliged to fit the images of interpreters as “perfect” speakers of English, and to achieve this solely through individual effort. By exploring the language journeys of those belonging to the two groups, the chapter demonstrates how neoliberal ideologies that idealize individual effort in pursuing the goal of becoming a particular type of “elite speaker” of English are circulated and internalized by English language learners in the context of “English fever” in Korea.
This volume critically examines the phenomenon of “English fever” in South Korea from both micro- and macro-perspectives. Drawing on original research and rich illustrative examples, the book investigates two key questions: why is English so popular in Korea, and why is there such a gap between the ‘dreams’ and ‘realities’ associated with English in Korea? These questions are explored through the eyes of English-Korean translators and interpreters, who represent the professional group most intensely engaged in the zeal for English language mastery. Macro-perspectives focus on historical factors leading to the rise of English, with English-Korean translation and interpreting as a key theme. Micro-perspectives explore the dreams that individuals attach to English and the ways in which they imagine it can transform their lives, and contrast these dreams with the stark realities felt on the ground. The gaps between these dreams and realities are explored from various angles, which include commodification, gender and neoliberalism. The book thus offers fresh insights on how the phenomenon of “English fever” has been created, reproduced, and sustained from both historical and contemporary viewpoints.
This article deals with the European and American community in Korea between the conclusion of Korea’s first international treaties in the early 1880s and the country’s annexation by the Japanese Empire in 1910. It begins by presenting an overview of the community. Concentrated in Seoul and Chemulp’o, the Anglo-Saxon element dominated a community made up of diplomats, foreign experts in the service of the Korean government, merchants and missionaries. Next, the article describes two key characteristics of the European and American residents in Korea. First, they were individuals who defined themselves as bourgeois, or middle-class; second, the term “translocality” serves to bring together the multiple layers of border-crossing these individuals were involved in—as long-distance migrants between Europe or North America and East Asia, as migrants within East Asia, and as representatives of different European and American nationalities living together in Korea.
This article proposes some analytical and methodological approaches to the urban ethnography of the human voice. Drawing on research among Protestant Christians in Seoul, South Korea, I consider the voice along three semiotic dimensions: the relationship between body and sound, the relationship between speech and song, and the relationship between the literal voice and more metaphorical understandings of voice (as perspective, political position, personhood, style, etc.). By focusing on Seoul’s rapid postwar urbanization, the growth of Protestant Christianity, and the intersection of these two phenomena in the suppression and erasure of signs of struggle and hardship by a certain population among the city’s Christians, I demonstrate how a focus on the human voice has the potential to illuminate important issues in the urban ethnography of newer Asian ‘megacities.’
In Cold War South Korea, the unmarked term “music” (eumak) came to signify Western classical music, and a host of ambiguous terms, including “folk music” (minsogeumak), “traditional music” (jeontongeumak), “indigenous music” (hyangtoeumak), and “national music” (gugak), emerged to categorize traditional practices that were rapidly disappearing from everyday cultural terrain. This West-centric development in musical culture has been euphemistically called “cosmopolitanism,” and in some cases, considered an index of national progress in the “race to modernization.” This paper attempts a critical reckoning of a specifically Cold-War form of cosmopolitanism by examining musicians who were at the center of this mid-century development: Christian Korean composers who left the North to flee the persecution of Christians by communist officials between 1945 (Korea’s independence from Japan) and 1953 (the end of the Korean War). I argue that the exiled composers were strategically positioned to construct secular and sacred music practices that reinforced the official cultural policy of the nascent U.S.-South Korea coalition. This exilic cultural work involved not just reconciling anticommunist nationalism with Western music idioms but also a related project of discouraging alternative conceptions of national (and nationally important) music. I first investigate how Christian exiles became the poetic voice of Cold War official culture through their elevated status in this culture’s institutions and narratives. Secondly, I consider the politics of this official culture, examining the music styles, genres, and compositions that were promoted or repressed. As I will show, Cold War music culture in South Korea was shaped by a confluence of mid-century international and intra-national politics, and Christian exiled composers were situated at the convergence of these mid-century concerns.
This paper draws together emerging literature within Geography, and from across the broader social sciences, around contemporary mission and missionaries. It argues for the importance of recognising mission organisations and missionaries not just as historic relics, but as important, active, and geographically far ranging actors in the modern world. In mapping out the little work that has been conducted, three themes are addressed, missionary geopolitics; mission, welfare and development; and transnational migration, religion and cosmopolitanism. The article highlights the potential contributions that a (re)examination of missionary lives, beliefs and praxis can make to these disparate bodies of literature, and calls for further research in these directions within geographical scholarship.
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