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  • The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea 1910–1945 by Sunyoung Park
  • Nayoung Aimee Kwon
The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 by Sunyoung Park. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015. Pp. xiv + 333. $49.95.

In The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945, Sunyoung Park offers readers a landmark critical overview and reevaluation of a significant but misunderstood history of leftist culture in colonial Korea and its contested legacies. The book sets out an ambitious trajectory of mapping the complex terrain of what it coins as "the Proletarian wave," which the author writes was not a single movement but "a broad alliance of writers, intellectuals, publishers, editors, and readers that arose within Korean culture in the mid-1910s and declined in the early 1940s with the approach of the Great Pacific War" (p. 1).

The task of the book is formidable as it aims to document and recuperate a counterhegemonic history (à la Raymond Williams) of a vast but largely forgotten cultural phenomenon that was violently suppressed at the height of its social influence, and whose suppression was maintained historically in a contentious and divided critical terrain mired by Cold War ideological biases and cross-cultural misunderstandings.

Park reminds us that such critical misreadings came from multiple sides and throughout various historical moments: for example, both South and North Korean hegemonic histories had respective political reasons for suppressing this history at the height of Cold War tensions, and it was only decades later that parts of the history were permitted to appear in official nationalist narratives.

Beyond Cold War ideologies, it is perhaps more surprising that critics attempting to offer cross-cultural understanding through comparative perspectives often perpetuated the harshest misrepresentations and devaluations for a global readership. In his influential 1994 book, Han Sŏrya and North Korean Literature, for example, Brian Myers writes "one is hard put to find any significant reflection of Marxist ideology in [this literature]. … Most of what was written in these years was marked by the same ethnocentric pastoralism and anti-industrialism [End Page 266] as contemporary Korean 'bourgeois' naturalism" (quoted on pp. 5–6). Park counters that it is precisely such misguided assumptions that prioritized orthodox adherence to theories developed elsewhere (namely the Soviet Union and Germany). Myers's assumptions hark back to and perpetuate provincial imperialist assumptions about the status of the colonized (and by extension, their thought) as static and backward visà-vis metropolitan "origins." Such criticisms gravely misunderstand the complexity of the task facing colonial-era thinkers who were burdened with translating such foreign ideas and adapting them to the local context at hand. Park reminds us of Frantz Fanon's postcolonial imperative in The Wretched of the Earth: "A Marxist analysis should 'always be slightly stretched' when we think of colonial society and analyze its cultural products" (quoted on p. 40).

In the particular case of Korea under the dual burden of Japanese colonialism and Western imperialism at large, some of the discrepancies emerged from a local condition in which a pre-industrial peasant society was reeling from the oppressive exploitation of entrenched landed aristocrats as well as that of newly arrived Japanese imperialist occupiers. In such a context, the concept of the "proletariat" as a collectivized urban labor force, for example, could not adequately reflect the largely agrarian character of Korea's subaltern population.

Furthermore, in the colonial context, the national question stood at the forefront of collective movements—well beyond the limited concerns that bourgeois nationalists had expressed in noncolonial societies. The national question and the related concern about self-determinacy had to be carefully negotiated, in cooperation with and in conflict against both the global socialist call for class solidarity emanating from the Soviet and Japanese Communist establishments and also the pan-Asianist rhetoric to stand in solidarity against Western imperialism at large.

In the face of harsh crackdowns on party organization within the colony, the leftist movements of colonial Koreans had to rely on and negotiate with various allegiances. These allegiances spanned an impressive geographical terrain, including substantial exiled communities in China, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Through these communities...

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