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Sunyoung Park is the Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on modern Korean history, literature, culture and criticism. Park has also edited and translated collections of short stories, including, On the Eve of the Uprising and Other Stories from Colonial Korea (Cornell East Asian Series, 2010); Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of Science Fiction from South Korea (Kaya Press, 2019); and On the Origin of Species and Other Stories by Bo-Young Kim (Kaya Press, 2021). She is currently writing a monograph on science fiction and the politics of modernization in South Korea.  

Issue #29 of The Internationalist draws from Park’s landmark text, The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Harvard University Press, 2015). In this excerpt, Park examines the rise and decline of the proletarian wave in Korean culture during the colonial period — and its enduring impact on the region today.

“The proletarian wave” refers to 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. Commonly inspired by the rise of leftist movements on the international scene, these cultural agents came together in formal and informal associations, student groups, literary journals, writing contests, reading circles, and public lectures with the intention of filtering the cultural and social experience of colonial Korea through the ideological prism of various radical theories. The doctrines of anarchism and Marxism were powerful influences, but equally widespread were broader ideas about social democracy, the political emancipation of the masses, and the experience of the Russian Revolution. Ideological orthodoxy, in any case, was more the exception than the rule, as few classics of socialism had been yet translated into Korean. One could perhaps say that the zeitgeist had brought socialism to Korea at this time in history. The socialist message then resonated loudly among many who were trying to grasp the complex political, social, and cultural realities of a newly colonized nation.

This proletarian wave was never organized or institutionalized as a single movement. Throughout the colonial era (1910– 45), the cultural left consisted of a sparse and often fractious constellation of groups that differed widely in membership and ideological orientation. The radical core of this small cultural universe was occupied, beginning in 1925, by the Marxist organization of the Korea Artista Proleta Federatio (KAPF), a high-profile collective whose advocacy of politicized arts would ultimately be stopped by the Japanese authorities in 1935. The KAPF was at once a propeller for the entire leftist movement and a catalyst for debate among its different constituencies, some of which espoused competing or barely compatible brands of socialist ideology. Ever since the mid-1910s, for example, anarchism in the style of Peter Kropotkin had been a major inspiration for Korean exiles and students in China and Japan, and throughout the colonial period the doctrine offered an important ideological alternative and counterpoint to Marxism. Likewise, in a shifting dynamic of competition and cooperation, an influential group of leftist nationalist intellectuals initially attacked the KAPF for its pronounced emphasis on class over nation, but these same intellectuals later allied with the Marxists in the umbrella organization of the Sin’ganhoe (New Korea Society; 1927– 31). There were also groups that, owing to their social or  geographical location, carried out their activities outside of the mainstream of colonial culture. In this respect, socialist women writers were virtually on their own due to the ingrained gender segregation of Korean society, and a substantial number of cultural activists among Korean emigrants in Japan tended to self-organize rather than refer to the KAPF or to other Korean organizations.

The influence of the proletarian wave was felt powerfully across Korea during the colonial period. As one commentator wrote, Marxism started spreading “like an influenza” after the rousing anti-Japanese insurrections of March 1, 1919, and by 1925 there was barely a young writer whose work did not exhibit some influence of radical ideologies. Although exact membership is hard to assess, at its peak the KAPF alone reportedly counted over 150 active affiliates at ten branch offices, including one in Tokyo. A survey of the archives yields over sixty left-leaning Korean- language periodicals published in Korea, Japan, China, and the Soviet Union during the first half of the twentieth century. The most prominent partisan magazines were Kaebyŏk (Creation; 1920– 26), Chosŏn chi kwang (Light of Korea; 1922– 30), and Pip’an (Criticism; 1931– 40), but also friendly to the socialist cause were prestigious mainstream periodicals such as Chosŏn ilbo (Korean daily), Hyŏndae p’yŏngnon (Contemporary criticism), and Sin yŏsŏng (New women). Some writers and novels enjoyed broad popularity. Humorist Ch’ae Mansik, for example, whose biting satires chastised the habits of the rising urban bourgeoisie, was a mainstay in 1930s popular magazines. Similarly, Yi Kiyŏng, whose masterpiece Hometown (Kohyang) was greatly acclaimed during its original 1934 serialization in Chosŏn ilbo, had his novel reprinted six times in book form, all the while being heralded as the greatest Korean writer of peasant literature. The leftists contributions ran the gamut of literary genres, ranging from poems, novels, essays, and plays to cultural criticism as well as to translations of radical literature from Japan, Europe, Russia, and the United States.

The intense adventure of the proletarian wave did not end well. Initially emboldened by revolutionary and internationalist ideas, young Korean intellectuals soon found themselves under the strict watch of Japanese colonial authorities. All socialist activity was sent underground with the forcible dissolution of the KAPF in 1935, and by 1941, in the shadow of fascism and with the Great Pacific War underway, all forms of resistance became impracticable in the colonized peninsula. 

If this activist wave struggled during the colonial era, however, its memory resonated long afterward. Indeed, the historical experience of the proletarian wave went on to become a high mark of political activism and a model of cultural politics for generations to come. The much celebrated democratization movement of the 1970s and 1980s took explicit inspiration from the leftist radicalism of the colonial period, and still today the most prominent writers of that era are widely read and taught as part of the canonized tradition of Korean realism. On the strength of this posthumous vindication, the colonial leftist movement provides a fitting illustration of Stuart Hall’s dictum that cultural forces that are defeated at any one time do not simply disappear, as they become grist for the mill of new history in later eras. Today the proletarian wave occupies a special place in the collective memory of both South and North Koreans, and its legacy lives on as a common origin in the present and a possible unifying factor in the future.

This excerpt has been taken, with permission, from The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (Sunyoung Park, Harvard University Press, 2015)

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