동화(同化) 혹은 초극(超克)- 식민지 조선에서의 근대초극론 -

Abstract

In this study I intend to focus on the political, social, and cultural boundaries, which were newly restructured in colonial Korea from the period the Sino-Japanese War to the Pacific War. At the intersection of the intentions of empire, which sought total mobilization of the colony's human and material resources, and the desires of the colonized, sought to widen and exploited the gaps in those intentions, where and how did the existing borders ruptured or dissolved? At the same time, how did those ruptures and dissolutions again conceal? And how did the discussions of "overcoming modernity," transmitted as they were from the empire, operate in this process? The entirety of colonial intellectuals of this period were steeped in the basic logic of "overcoming modernity," which was the collapse of Western modernity and the presentation of a new world-historical vision to replace it. This was transmitted from the colonial suzerain, and to that extent, assuming they were not considering the difference in the levels of the modernity of Japanese and colonial society, they were not conscious that this could not help but conceal yet another reality. The desire of the colonized who chose "assimilation" as a new "universalism" that could "overcome" colonial inequality while preserving "ethnonational particularity" resonated with the voice of the state that demanded an erasure of differences for assimilation. "Orientalism"(東洋主義) is one result of this, while the other is the formation of the "New Korean=New Japanese=New Asian" colonial subject.