[KS] New Univ Hawaii Press Books: Tikhonov's The Red Decades, Kwon's Moral Authoritarianism

[Cheehyung Harrison Kim]

To the Korean Studies Community:

The *Center for Korean Studies <https://manoa.hawaii.edu/koreanstudies/>*
at the *University of Hawaii at Manoa* is delighted and excited to announce
the publication of two marvelous Korean studies books from the University
of Hawaii Press: *Vladimir Tikhonov's **The Red Decades: Communism as
Movement and Culture in Korea, 1919-1945 *and* Shinyoung Kwon's **Moral
Authoritarianism: Neighborhood Associations in the Three Koreas,
1931-1972. *

The two books are part of our flagship *Hawaii Studies on Korea
<https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/bookseries/hawaii-studies-on-korea/> *book
series. Descriptions of the books are below. All inquiries, including *book*
*review requests*, should be sent to the *book series editor Cheehyung
Harrison Kim (Dept of History, chk7 at hawaii.edu <chk7 at hawaii.edu>)*. The books
are available in paperback for $28
<https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/new-releases/>. Check out our catalog for more
information
<https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/UH-Press-2023-Fall-Catalog.pdf>
.


Vladimir Tikhonov
*The Red Decades: Communism as Movement and Culture in Korea, 1919-1945*
[image: Tikhonov Red Decades.jpg]


Shinyoung Kwon
*Moral Authoritarianism: Neighborhood Associations in the Three Koreas,
1931-1972*
[image: Kwon Moral Authoritarianism.jpg]

DESCRIPTIONS

*The Red Decades: Communism as Movement and Culture in Korea,
1919-1945 (October 2023)
<https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/the-red-decades-communism-as-movement-and-culture-in-korea-1919-1945/>*
*Vladimir Tikhonov *is a professor of Korean and East Asian studies at the
Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Oslo University

Focusing on previously neglected cultural expressions of colonial-period
Korean socialism such as Marxist philosophy, Marxist historiography, and
travelogues by socialist writers, *The Red Decades* reveals Marxian
socialism as a cultural phenomenon of colonial-age Korea. Providing an
account of the social composition of the Communist milieu in 1920s and
1930s Korea and outlining the aims of the colonial-period Communist
movement as formulated in programmic documents, this text offers a rich,
nuanced description of the microcosm of Korean Communism—a setting of
factional alignments, pilgrimages to Moscow, extended stays of the Korean
revolutionaries as exiles in China and the Soviet Union, and a polylingual
environment with Chinese, Japanese, English, and Russian being equally
important as the idioms of socialist propagation and international
networking. Placing the endeavors of colonial-age Communists within a
global historical context allows for dissections of how Korean socialists'
ideals interacted with the realities of the conservative turn taking place
in the Soviet Union since the late 1920s, as well as considering the
implication of Stalinism for Korean revolutionary culture. Yet this
analysis also focuses on the individuals involved, especially on their
persistent issue of factionalism in the Korean Communist movement and on
the role of underground radicalism in shaping the subaltern subjectivities
of the participants. The Red Decades discusses the world-historical place
of “alternative modernity” that colonial-age socialists of Korea were
pursuing. Based on a wealth of Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Chinese
primary sources, including the Korea-related parts of the archives of
Comintern, an under-utilized resource in Anglophone scholarship. The
research also accommodates the achievements of the last decades, from South
Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Anglophone and Russophone academic worlds. The
breadth of this study situates the philosophical, historiographical, and
political practices of Marxism of colonial Korea in the global historical
perspective and simultaneously explores the long-lasting influences of the
Communist movement in post-1945 North and South Korea.


*Moral Authoritarianism: Neighborhood Associations in the Three Koreas,
1931-1972 (November 2023)
<https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/moral-authoritarianism-neighborhood-associations-in-the-three-koreas-1931-1972/>*
*Shinyoung Kwon *received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago
and did postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge.

*Moral Authoritarianism* offers a new perspective on the three modern
Korean states—the Japanese colonial state, South Korea, and North Korea—by
studying neighborhood associations during the four war decades
(1930s–1960s). The existing historiography perceives the three states in
relation to imperialism and to the Cold War, thus emphasizing their
differences by political changes. By shifting the focus from national
policy to local society, this book instead reveals their deep similarities.
Neighborhood associations dated back to the premodern Chosŏn period
(1392–1910), where they had been used to assist local governance. They
faded in significance until the colonial government established “patriotic
neighborhood associations” in 1938 for its war against China. Through
analysis of government documents from the three Koreas and additional
sources including diaries, leaflets, newspapers, and even fiction, *Moral
Authoritarianism* explores neighborhood associations as a site of
negotiation between families, local society, and the central government,
exposing the moral authoritarian structure present in all three Koreas.
Colonial neighborhood associations, tasked with the national mobilization
of local Koreans, advanced programs of mass enlightenment that privileged
state interests over individual rights, in the process blurring the line
between morality and state authority and superimposing patriarchal familial
dynamics on societal relations. Despite their different ideological
orientations, the neighborhood associations of two postliberation Koreas
shared the same enlightenment mission with their earlier forms, and this
commonality is critical to understanding the authoritarian direction taken
by South and North Korea. The neighborhood association entrusted each state
with promoting community-based morality and spirit of voluntarism as an
alternative to amoral laissez-faire capitalism and the individual
right-based West. Consequently, the state retained its supremacy over the
populace at the most basic level of community organization, and Koreans
were encouraged to be voluntarily active to state calls, culminating into
two authoritarianisms of the 1970s—Korean style democracy and “our own
style” socialism.
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