The Terror of the Crowd: The Riot as a Form of Street Politics in Colonial Korea 1920-29

Abstract

This study examines the Korean crowd riots that occurred in 1920s colonial Korea. By viewing these riots as a result of the collective experience generated through the March First Movement, this paper progresses beyond generalized colonialist and modernist discourses to specifically analyze the internal dynamics of the riots that occurred during the period. Colonial authorities and Japanese settlers in Korea during the early 1920s perceived a clear change in Korean society following the March First Movement. More specifically, clashes with colonial authorities or Japanese settlers in daily life now tended to provoke a collective riotous response—a kind of crowd politics. To analyze the crowd riots, this study employs two concepts: the politics of the event and the politics of numbers. It argues that as spontaneous events, Korean crowd riots constituted political behavior and demonstrated the potential social power underlying the institutional/semi-institutional spaces of politics in 1920s colonial Korea.