Harvard East Asian Monographs, 374. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor], 2015. xiv, 333 pp., [10] pp. of plates. (Illustrations.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-41717-5.
Sunyoung Park’s The Proletarian Wave is a remarkably detailed history of leftist cultural movements in colonial Korea and a penetrating work of criticism that provides new ways to connect literary representation with the political and social problems of capitalism and colonialism. It is an impressive work of scholarship, bringing together the best of Korean-language archival and historical work on the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945), broader questions about anarchism, nationalism, and gender in Marxian cultural and intellectual history, and adept and illuminating readings of literary and critical texts of leftist writers in colonial Korea.
Park’s book is very steeped in the South Korean scholarship on colonial-period leftist writers that has blossomed in the last thirty years with democratization, including the many works by Kim Yoon-sik and his students. In taking up some of the insights of this work, but simultaneously connecting it to postcolonial theory, Third World cultural movements, and feminism, she deftly translates for an Anglophone readership the global cultural significance of works of “leftist” literature that were previously dismissed as naïve or simplistically nationalistic. She rightly criticizes previous characterizations by Michael Robinson, Brian Myers, and Tatiana Gabroussenko, all of whom argue that Korean intellectuals did not properly comprehend or apply Marxist, socialist, or communist ideology and were prone to nativist and antimodern perspectives. After reading Park’s comprehensive study, which traverses the aesthetic debates and literary texts from across the political spectrum of the left—from anarchism to Korea Artista Proleta Federatio (KAPF) to “fellow travellers”—it should be impossible to monolithically characterize or dismiss this literature in such a way, or to assume that writers such as Ch’oe Sŏhae, Yi Kiyŏng, Kang Kyŏngae, Kim Namch’ŏn, Kim Kijin, Im Hwa, and Yŏm Sangsŏp were not involved in serious and important debates about representation, proletarianization, uneven development, everyday life, gendered labour, migration, nationalism, and a host of other issues that still concern Marxian scholars. Rather than assuming that the differences or incongruent elements introduced in the translation of “orthodoxy” are an effect of a cultural or intellectual lack, Park shifts the focus to the underlying economic and social structure of Korea (an industrializing colony) and to the complexities of translating universalist models of history or politics into a politically complex and crisis-ridden socioeconomic situation.
Two of Park’s successful strategies are to expand our understanding of leftist literature beyond KAPF and to pay attention to the slipperiness of a term like “proletariat” in the context of colonial Korea. In part 1, “Backgrounds,” she provides a clear and useful synthesis of the historical works on the emergence of socialist and communist movements in colonial Korea, but also provides a convincing historical and theoretical account of how colonialism brought particular challenges to these movements and why culture then became the primary arena for leftist politics. If leftist literature in Korea was unorthodox, nationalist, and focused on the cultural realm, it was in part because the orthodoxy of the Comintern did not allow for autonomous communist parties in colonized countries. Part 2, “Landscapes,” continues this thread of argument on orthodoxy by convincingly making the case that we turn our attention to the centrality of anarchist ideas of mutual aid and anti-authoritarianism, as well as the variety of realist representations of modernity by feminists and “fellow travelers”—all of which have something significant to say about a still largely rural and nonindustrial colonial society. This part also provides a very detailed discussion of the complex history of the translation and iteration of concepts of the “proletariat.” It also connects the aesthetic approaches of leftist literatures to the broader context of literary publication, including naturalism and cultural nationalism, in order to bring out the precise contributions and critiques made by leftist writers at the level of representation and aesthetic experience. Part 3, “Portraits,” exhibits Park’s skillful close readings and provides fresh approaches to Yŏm Sangsŏp’s penetrating realism, Kang Kyŏngae’s representations of gendered labour and exploitation, and Kim Namch’ŏn’s ironic treatment of everyday life under totalitarian rule.
Park’s book addresses some of the same texts and problems that appear in my own monograph, and I was pleasantly surprised to find theoretical resonances, and even some similarly chosen passages from literary works, in two manuscripts written without any collaboration or exchange of drafts. Approached from my own concerns, two things I thought the book could have discussed in more detail are 1) the role of Japanese-language texts in the circulation of socialist and communist ideas and 2) the ways Marxists were able to reconcile their ideas about world history with Japanese imperialism, particularly in the early 1940s (the book title suggests that it covers the late colonial period). On the other hand, in shifting the focus from Japanese colonial and imperial discourse and the mediation of the Japanese colonial state to the rich history of Korean-language texts of the cultural left, the virtue of Park’s text and approach is that she is able to properly flesh out the breadth, depth, and intellectual complexity of the Korean-language archive like no other Anglophone monograph on colonial Korea has yet done, to my knowledge.
Travis Workman
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA
pp. 842-843