He Rests from His Labors”

Racialized Recreation and Missionary Science in Colonial Korea

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12423970
AutoresDerek J Kramer (0000-0003-4688-633X, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen29
Número2
Páginas347-372
Fecha de publicación2021-04-22
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
Revistapositions asia critique (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1067-9847 • E-ISSN: 1527-8271
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/10679847-8852111
OpenAlexW3157499705
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas36

This article examines how Anglo-American evangelicals in colonial Korea employed racialized understandings of the environment to justify a culture of recreation and health. In the metropole and periphery, missionary researchers studying climate, geography, and public health asserted a science-based injunction to rest that was intended to maintain a population of evangelical workers. The production of this scientific research, external to the Japanese colonial state, allowed the missionary community to establish a rationale for collective segregation from the local populations they sought to save. In Korea, this dynamic is profiled through the history of a missionary resort at Sorai beach. Initially believed to have contributed to the suicide of an evangelical worker in 1895, within a few years the Sorai area rapidly transformed. In step with the broader culture of summer recreation that emerged in Korea during the 1910s and 1920s, the missionaries recast Sorai from a deleterious space into a site of strategic and devotional rest

Colonialism · Geography · Political science · Population · Recreation · Rest (music · Sociology · State (computer science · Chinese history and philosophy · Demography · Gender Studies · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Medicine · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies