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How did people analyze and criticize colonial oppression a century ago? How did they find connection and imagine solidarity with others in distant parts of the world experiencing social injustice? This talk reconsiders the “global” dimensions of Korean anti-imperialism during the Japanese colonial period (1910-45), discussing several primary sources such as newspapers, magazines, and the work of intellectuals. The Korean anti-imperial movement and its thought were inherently transnational in its scope. Such transnationality developed under shifting political conditions in which the movement leaders, participants, and supporters wrestled with Japanese colonial domination. As officials censored criticism of the colonial regime, activists and writers negotiated the interventions by the colonial power. While some were involved in clandestine organized activities, others offered critical analyses of colonialism in academic studies, socialist literature, and journalistic accounts.

This talk pays particular attention to the ways that Korean intellectuals developed an interest in colonialism and racism in other parts of the world like India, Taiwan, and the United States. During the 1920s and early 1930s, as people traveled outside of Korea in spite of the border control and surveillance by colonial authority, intellectuals shaped their transnational perspectives. Through publications and media coverage about empire and global social movements, interwar Korean intellectuals and readers situated their colonial experience in world transformations and explored the possibilities for decolonization. Socialists, in particular, envisioned decolonization in tandem with other forms of social justice, namely socioeconomic equity for workers. Female leaders on the left, importantly, also argued for women’s liberation. In the places where they relocated or visited, migrants, international students, and exiled intellectuals witnessed and participated in different forms of social movements, which contributed to their visions of global solidarity.

Hiroaki Matsusaka is an intellectual and cultural historian of migration, social movements, and race and ethnicity across modern East Asia and North America. He is working on a book manuscript that traces the paths of several anti-imperial migrant activists across Korea, Japan, and the United States from the early to mid-twentieth century. He received a BA and an MA in Political Science from Waseda University and a PhD in History from the University of Michigan. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Korean Studies at Yonsei University, a Terasaki Postdoctoral Fellow in Japanese Studies at UCLA, and an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. In April 2021, he is starting a tenured position as a lecturer of global studies at Osaka University of Economics.