This lecture, based on Vladimir Tikhonov’s recent book, The Red Decades: Communism as Movement and Culture in Korea, 1919-1945, will deal with the process through which Marxian socialism was domesticated and applied in different realms of society, thought and culture in colonial-age Korea. Seen as the alternative modernity, the way out from both premodern backwardness and modern predicaments, Marxian socialism gave life to a distinctively Korean brand of Marxist thought which focused its critique on such reified concepts as “nation” or “national culture.” It enabled Korean intellectuals to criticise contemporary far-right totalitarianism in Europe and search for ways of gender liberation by empowering women and emphasizing their agency. It was predicated on a vision of an interconnected globe, a spatio-temporality in which concurrent developments in Soviet Union or Chinese revolution were just as important as what was happening domestically, or inside the Japanese Imperial borders. As Vladimir Tikhonov argues, while these alternative modernist visions were never fully realized, their impact on both post-colonial Korean states was in many ways decisive.
Vladimir Tikhonov (Pak Noja) is a professor of Korean and East Asian studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Oslo University. Previously, he taught at Kyunghee University (Seoul, 1997-2000). His research focuses on the history of modern ideas in Korea and currently on Korean Communist movement. He published Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Korea: the Beginnings (Brill, 2010) as well as Modern Korea and its Others: Perceptions of the Neighbouring Countries and Korean Modernity (Routledge, 2015).He also recently co-authored Intellectuals In Between: Koreans in a Changing World, 1850 to 1945 (Peter Lang, 2022) and co-edited Buddhist Modernities - Re-inventing Tradition in the Globalizing Modern World (Routledge, 2017) and Military Chaplaincy in an Era of Religious Pluralism (Oxford University Press, 2017). His most recent book is The Red Decades: Communism as Movement and Culture in Korea, 1919–1945 (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023).