In/dependence days: Social regulation, Christian nationalists and mnemonic practices in colonized Korea (1896--1957)

This dissertation examines the practice of public memory in colonized Korea from 1896 to 1957. In analyzing Korean public memory, I focus on the political commemoration of Independence Day and how Christian nationalists have used this strategic arena of public sentiment to mobilize civic and popular struggles for national independence. Based on several years of archival research, I conclude Korean Independence Days have undergone three major mnemonic regulations: hegemonic, subordinate and solidaristic. These regulatory regimes resulted from political struggles between colonized states and Christian nationalists under four imperial interventions (China, Japan, the United States and the Soviet Union). This conclusion leads to a series of questions: how do public memories emerge in the political interaction between states and subordinates, what role do state and subordinate actors play in constituting these memories, and how do changes in imperial regimes affect public memories?;In order to answer these questions, I look at one phase of cultural production in colonized Korea: the social regulation of public memory. To map out the social regulation of public memory, I examine transformations in Independence Day commemorations to discern how Christian nationalists regulated public memory in their political interactions with royal, imperial, republican and socialist sovereignties. The uniqueness of the Korean case emerges from the regulatory relations between state and subordinate under imperial intervention. Due to these interventions, three mnemonic regulations emerged on the Korean peninsular: hegemonic, subordinate and solidaristic. Each public memory regulation exhibits the nature of the state-subordinate political struggle, creating a mnemonic topography and social imaginary that undergoes effacement and conservation during subsequent imperial interventions. In these historical progressions, Christian nationalists have used Independence Days to efface competing political interests, beginning with Imperial China in the hegemonic period, Imperial Japan in the subordinate period, and the social nationalist in the solidaristic period.;Unlike similar nationalist encounters with imperial interventions, Korean Christians regulated the means of public memory to mobilize elite and mass popular forces in a hybrid position between empire, state and colony. Contrary to the theses that the national imaginary forms in the privatization of moral regulation (cultural home) or in the public market of Western imaginaries (print capitalism), the Korean case locates the regulatory moment in the semi-autonomous network of Korean Christians and their unique blend of Western republicanism and Christian-Confucian moralism. I conclude that Christian nationalists have used commemorative practices to reinforce an elite political subjectivity, the Korean national citizen, and have used this moral exemplar to help regulate the mass popular, to legitimate the social position of Korean Christians and to establish Christian agency as the official anti-colonial memory for South Korea.