Jang Wook Huh

After Langston Hughes was shadowed by Japanese police in the port city of Chongjin, Korea, on his trip from the Soviet Union to Japan and China in 1933, he drew a parallel between the racialization of Koreans under Japanese colonial rule and that of American Negroes under Jim Crow rule. This essay examines Hughes's writings on Korea in conjunction with Korean translations of Hughes. Hughes employs the poetics of what I call “overlapping dispossessions” to analogize Korean colonial subjugation wi

"Imagining a Black Pacific" traces a literary history of political and cultural interaction between African Americans and Koreans from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. It argues that black and Korean authors explored literary modes of antiracial solidarity against the Japanese and U.S. empires. Building on diverse archives of U.S. missionary and Korean Christian texts, State Department records, and military documents, as well as literary works, periodicals, and jazz songs, this di

Abstract In the 1900s American missionaries used the industrial vision of the African American leader Booker T. Washington to instill the idea of economic progress in Koreans. Inspired by this uplift model, the Korean intellectual Yun Ch’i-ho (Yun Ch’iho) and US Southern Methodists founded the Anglo-Korean School in 1906, where students would later produce textile products called “Korea mission cloth” for global sale. This article examines the promotion of manual labor in the intersection of rel

Abstract This essay examines the relationship between the cultural appropriation of Black female artistic labor and the anticolonial invocation of modernity in an East Asian context. In the 1930s, Koreans featured erotic, mobile, and modern images of the world‐famous performer Josephine Baker in the popular magazine Jogwang . In 1935 and 1936, the cartoonist and illustrator Kim Gyu‐taek rewrote the legendary folktale Simcheongjeon in the form of “narrative cartoons.” In doing so, he linked Baker

This chapter examines the dynamics of racial othering in the context of national rebuilding after the Korean War (1950–1953). In particular, it reads “Pŭllaek Chyo” (“Black Joe,” 1964), a novella by Paek Inbin about a Korean-black teenage boy, and Ŏmma, naman wae kŏmŏyo (Mom, Why Am I Black Alone, 1965), an autobiographical story by Kim Sundŏk, a Korean-black teenage girl. As these texts describe, Koreans maintained the system of patriarchy and the myth of racial purity at the expense of margina

Korean writers living in the United States and Korea translated the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s, a decade in which the so-called New Negro Movement in northern American cities was declining and Japanese assimilation policies in colonial Korea were accelerating. For their work of translation, Han Hŭkku (1909–1979) used the original text of The New Negro (1925) by Alain Locke, and Han Sŏrya (1900–1976) and No Ch'unsŏng (1898–1940) drew on Japanese sources on the literature and hi

Scholars have invoked diaspora as a framework to enlarge the scope of traditionally area-based fields in that “diaspora offers an alternative ‘ground’ to that of the territorial state for the intricate and always contentious linkage between cultural identity and political organization.”1 More specifically, the resurgence of inquiries into the relationship between immigration and radicalism puts Korean studies in conversation with Korean American studies, or vice versa, while attributing the libe

Abstract In 1964 a Korean scholar wrote to Langston Hughes, asking him to send some sources for publishing the “first Negro literature series” in Korea. Providing some of his books, Hughes supported the project that would feature “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and other works. This article examines how Koreans translated “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and other poems from the late 1940s to 1970s to explore Hughes's long-lasting influence on Korea. Korea's political landscape drastically changed duri

This chapter examines Korean translations of Langston Hughes’s short fiction in the 1930s to trace Hughes’s inspiration for the willful violation of social order. In the mid-1930s when Korea was under Japanese rule (1910–45), Jong-su Yi introduced Hughes’s leftist vision to a Korean audience by translating “Mother and Child” and “Cora Unashamed.” The medium of the magazine facilitated this global dissemination of Hughes. The act of translating pieces from contemporaneous non-Japanese-language pe