[KS] [KS} New publication: The Red Decades: Communism as Movement and Culture in Korea, 1919–1945

[Vladimir Tikhonov]

Dear colleagues,

With all the due apologies for shameless self-promotion and any possible cross-posting, I would like to inform you that my most recent book, < The Red Decades: Communism as Movement and Culture in Korea, 1919–1945>, was published now by University of Hawaii Press, as a part of Hawai‘i Studies on Korea series. The book is 420 pages long. It discusses the world-historical place of “alternative modernity” that colonial-age socialists of Korea were pursuing. It is 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. 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 endeavours 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 announcement of book's publication can be found here: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/the-red-decades-communism-as-movement-and-culture-in-korea-1919-1945/   Here is the table of contents:

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Red Age Worldwide and 
Colonial Korea, 1919 to Late 1930s 1
Part I The Organization
CHAPTER 1 Actors of the Korean Communist Movement 33
CHAPTER 2 Factions and the Meanings of the Factional Struggle 75
CHAPTER 3 The Communist Programs 102
Part II The Realm of New Knowledge
CHAPTER 4 The Marxist Philosophy of Pak Ch’iu 131
CHAPTER 5 The Socialist Concepts of Nation and History 157
CHAPTER 6 Kim Saryang’s Observations of Liberated 
China, 1945 185
CHAPTER 7 The Red Capital of Moscow in the Eyes 
of Korean Travelers 207
Postscript: The Afterlife of Socialism 
in the Two Koreas 232
Conclusion: A Balance Sheet of Korea’s Red Age 255
Notes 271
Bibliography 335

Best,

Vladimir Tikhonov (Oslo University)