Kornel Chang will be giving a talk based on his new book\, A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation. With the collapse o f the Japanese Empire in August 1945\, the Korean peninsula erupted with ho pes that had been bottled up for nearly forty years. A Fractured Liberation tells the story of how Koreans—from political leaders and activists to ord inary peasants\, workers\, and women—experienced the shock of liberation\, what they thought it might bring\, the great expectations\, and the opportu nities and challenges they faced as a newly emancipated people. The book al so looks at how the entry of American forces complicated\, and ultimately\, narrowed possibilities for liberation. U.S. officials fought over how to b est fulfill Korean aspirations and how they should be prioritized among com peting objectives in Korea. An eclectic group of American and Korean reform ers—New Deal liberals\, Christian socialists\, and trade unionists—proposed an agenda of democratization and reform as an alternative to the rigid ant i-communism of the military high command. Their stories reveal the paths no t taken. In telling them\, A Fractured Liberation restores contingency to a narrative that looks ahead to war and division as an inevitable endpoint.< /p>
About the Author:
Kornel Chang
is Associate Professor of History and American Studies and Chair of the Hi
story Department at Rutgers University-Newark. His first book Pacific C
onnections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands is a history o
f Asian migration to the Pacific Northwest\, revealing how their movements
sparked some of the first battles over territorial boundaries in North Amer
ica. It won the Association for Asian American Studies History Book Prize a
nd was a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Book Prize. His second book\,
A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation\, recently pub
lished by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press\, is a narrative histor
y of southern Korea in the aftermath of World War II\, when the collapse of
the Japanese Empire ushered in an extraordinary moment of promise and poss
ibility that was foreclosed by foreign military occupations.