*Professor Kornel Chang will be giving a t alk from 3:30 to 5:00 PM PT\, followed by a conversation\, which will take place from 5:00 to 6:00 PM.
With the collaps e of the Japanese Empire in August 1945\, the Korean peninsula erupted with hopes that had been bottled up for nearly forty years. A Fract ured Liberation tells the story of how Koreans—from political leaders and activists to ordinary peasants\, workers\, and women—experienc ed the shock of liberation\, what they thought it might bring\, the great e xpectations\, and the opportunities and challenges they faced as a newly em ancipated people. The book also looks at how the entry of American forces c omplicated\, and ultimately\, narrowed possibilities for liberation. U.S. o fficials fought over how to best fulfill Korean aspirations and how they sh ould be prioritized among competing objectives in Korea. An eclectic group of American and Korean reformers—New Deal liberals\, Christian socialists\, and trade unionists—proposed an agenda of democratization and reform as an alternative to the rigid anti-communism of the military high command. Thei r stories reveal the paths not taken. In telling them\, A Fractured Liberat ion restores contingency to a narrative that looks ahead to war and divisio n as an inevitable endpoint.
Kornel Chang is Associa te Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers Univ ersity-Newark. He is a scholar of U.S. immigration and foreign relations\, focusing on U.S.-East Asian relations. His first book Pacific Connectio ns: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands is a history of Asian migration to the Pacific Northwest\, revealing how their movements sparked some of the first battles over territorial boundaries in North America. It won the Association for Asian American Studies History Book Prize and was a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Book Prize.
Participants are ask ed to read the Introduction of A Fractured Liberation< /em>. The book will be available for access and download through the UBC Li brary during the first week of March. If you encounter trouble accessing th e readings\, please email qhuang98@ma il.ubc.ca to enquire about PDF files.
The conversation will begin after Professor Chang’s book talk\, from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM. Participants will be invited to share their own reflections\, thoughts\, and connections made with the assigned chapters. All are welcome\; no RSVP is required. Fo r more information about the book talk\, please visit https://sppga.ubc.ca/even ts/event/korea-under-us-occupation/.
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