“Afro-Korean” Encounters: The Literary Intersections of Black Liberation Struggles in the U.S. and Anticolonial Movements in Korea, 1910-1953
FAIN: FEL-273781-21
Jang Wook Huh
University of Washington (Seattle, WA 98195-1016)
Research and writing of a book on the interaction between Korean and African American authors from 1910 to 1953 on topics of discrimination, colonialism, and freedom.
My project examines the radical interactions between African Americans and Koreans in the twentieth century. Drawing on a diverse range of archives, including U.S. missionary documents, declassified government files, and military records, as well as literary and cultural texts, my scholarly monograph argues for political connections between Black liberation struggles in the United States and anticolonial movements in Korea that resisted Japanese colonization (1910-1945) and U.S. military intervention (1945-1953). Through readings of Black writers and activists, and of Korean writers and intellectuals, my work highlights literary experimentations concerned with U.S. racial discrimination and Asian colonial subjugation to challenge the Japanese and U.S. empires. By bridging African American and Korean studies, I show how people of color invoke narratives of human freedom beyond national borders through shared notions of dispossession.