자치와 난민: 일제시기 만주기행문을 통해 본 재만조선인 농민

Abstract

This essay examines the Korean Chinese immigrants in Manchuria from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, focusing on colonial Korean writers Manchurian travelogues and the historical situations at that time. Starting with an oral history of Hak Hyeon Choi who had resided in a collective village of the Korean Chinese set up by the Japanese colonial authority, I try to critically reexamine academic trend of Korean literary studies on the subaltern Koreans in Manchuria: indiscriminate identification of the Korean Chinese and the South Korean nation, idealistic approach to the nation, and incomplete understanding of the Korean Chinese situations as an immigrant nation in-between states. As an alternative to both interpretive schemes about the Koreans in Manchuria during the colonial period, resistance or pro-Japanese collaboration and collusion between the colonizer and the colonized, I demonstrate, first, their consistent orientation for autonomy either outside or inside a state, then, the frustration of the autonomist line and their becoming refugees, and, finally, their voluntary reversion to the Japanese rule. Especially, this essay focuses on the concrete, historical situations of the subaltern Korean Chinese, who were violently suppressed by all of the three armed justices: the assimilative pressure from the Chinese government, the imperial Japans expansion into Manchuria and the left-wing terrorism against the Japanese imperialism. This subaltern perspective leads us to an open question about the paradoxical structure of the modern world where the refugees exposed to extralegal violence are forced to voluntarily aspire to the government of any state for their security.