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Despite Korea's independence from Japan in 1945, collective memories of Japanese colonialism continue to shape South Korean national identity today. This article extends Charland's theory of constitutive rhetoric and reconsiders Billig's theory of banal nationalism to analyse key discourses of national memory in South Korea, including presidential speeches delivered on the Liberation Day of Korea (Gwangbokjeol) and exhibits at the Independence Hall (Dongnip Ginyeomgwan). This article examines how South Korean nationalistic discourses today, by fostering a sustained antagonism towards the Japanese, constitute a national identity in an inextricable relationship to the Japanese Other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From 2006 to 2010, I was an activist who organised grassroots campaigns about the so-called “comfort women” in Australia. During the course of these campaigns, this issue was framed in different ways by the Asian diaspora and feminist communities who supported the cause. Beginning with the premise that the human rights activist community is not harmonious or homogenous, nor is it organically formed, I ask the question: what is the task of an activist when faced with diverse and disconnected sources of support for our shared cause? I draw on adaptations of the concept of “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983, p. 7) by Ien Ang and Chandra Talpade Mohanty to discuss this question. I conclude that an activist must not be guided by an emotive and broad sense of “justice” alone. Rather, his or her key task is to seek localised and interdisciplinary knowledge and identity from the particular location of activism in order to mediate between the different “frames of meaning” in diverse communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study looks at how education policies in colonial Korea changed over time in order to accommodate the needs of the colonial authorities during the period of Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1910-1945). The colonial experience can be divided into four different periods according to the four Educational Ordinances issued in 1911, 1922, 1938, and 1943 by the colonial government with each period corresponding to a historic event or context. The constitutive relevance of colonial discourse for an understanding of education can be found in the gradual transformation of the education sector in Korea under colonial rule. It is evident that Japanese colonial policy was inherently contradictory in principle and in practice. On the one hand it sought the assimilation of the Koreans, while on the other it maintained its discriminatory and exploitative practices. Such contradiction was obvious within the colonial education system. As the principal instrument of assimilation, education was regarded as the primary means to subordinate the ethnic identity of the colonised and to transform them into loyal imperial subjects. An overview of the four different periods relevant to the changing circumstances to which the education sector responded reveals the social-historical implications of the instrumentality of colonial education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]