Korean Studies Association of Australasia (KSAA) 2019 Biennial Conference

Korea in the Age of Precarity and Global Success

This presentation is based on one section of my longest thesis chapter.*

I draw on historians' research on emotions to discuss the songs of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army (NAUA), which was a coalition of Chinese and Korean communist and non-communist guerrilla forces that operated in Manchuria from 1935-1945.

This presentation is called Narratives of Affinity because Korean and Chinese soldiers worked together and, possibly, wrote music with each other. It is important to view the NAUA as a collective entity that prefaced or competed with ethnic nationalism, so I use the idea of “emotional communities.” Within the framework of emotional communities, nationalism becomes one of many equally important sentiments. For this reason, I raise two questions: how was the emotional community of the NAUA built? How did the songs facilitate the operation of the NAUA as an emotional community? To answer these questions, I go through some of the literary devices that became modes of emotional expression in the NAUA's military music. The collective communication of emotions transforms literary or aesthetic features into the tools of social change and cultural invigoration. Evaluating specific literary devices within the songs sheds light on the systems of feeling that Chinese and Korean soldiers created, and how those systems shaped their affective bond with each other. The significance of studying emotions in the songs is to recognize and understand the cultural standards that have made the NAUA a point of pride for Korean and Chinese communities in northeast China since 1945.

*I am not including the full presentation speech in this post because it is under consideration for a chapter in an edited volume based on the conference proceedings.