김태준과 인민전선(people’s front)

Abstract

This paper attempted to reflect on the meaning of the People’s Front, United Front, and United Front and the limitations of the nation associated with them by looking back on Kim Tae-jun’s career in the late 1930s. After the lifting of the ban, Taejun Kim’s image was greatly influenced by existing ‘legends’. The title of head of the People’s Front Department within Gyeongseongcom Group was also a result of maximum interpretations of possibilities rather than reflecting reality. The term “Unification Front,” which appeared in many instances in the 1980s, was a kind of adaptation of the People’s Front, reflecting the special characteristics of South Korea. The ‘Fractured Common Front’, in which Kim Tae-joon participated with Lim Hwa and others, was a colonial embodiment of the ideals and practices of the People’s Front against fascism through several distortions. The ‘Fractured Common Front’, which is recalled in the liberation space, played a role in reducing the experience of the unified front and the People’s Front to the Korean Peninsula. On his way to Yanan, Kim Tae-joon encountered the Korean Volunteer Army and the Japanese Liberation League and witnessed the anti-fascism international solidarity of the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese people. However, this memory of the People’s Front was constantly resisted by national thinking at the time and in subsequent retrospect. At the same time, he received a double whammy of socialist knowledge that appropriated internationalism as his own. The solidarity of transnational anti-fascism that was realized in mainland China, that is, the short manifestation and long oblivion of the People’s Front in East Asia, once again reminds us of the existence of naturalized national boundaries and socialist knowing that limit our thinking.