DISSERTATION PROJECT

Future after Empire: Korean Intellectuals and Postcolonial Temporality in the “Liberation Space”, 1945–1950

Existing studies often treat the “Liberation Space” (1945–50) as a transition from colonialism to national division or as a prelude to the Korean War. Such interpretations often cast the Liberation Space as part of a linear historical trajectory. It treats as if the outcome were already known retrospectively and the Korean division and war were already inevitable. This project instead approaches the Liberation Space as a distinct postcolonial temporal field in which the future remained open, uncertain, and contested. The proposed doctoral thesis will examine how Korean political and literary intellectuals imagined the future after the collapse of Japanese colonial rule, focusing on Korea’s Liberation Space between 1945 and 1950.

The main focus is that the liberation of Korea did not produce a single, settled vision of Korea’s future. The sudden collapse of Japanese colonial rule disrupted established ideas of historical progress, continuity, and national destiny. Korean intellectuals, therefore, had to rethink the relationship between their colonial past, the unstable present of liberation, and the anticipated future. Political thinkers and literary writers sought to redefine what Korea should become after the empire. for example, a unified nation, a democratic polity, a socialist society, a morally renewed community, or a culturally regenerated people. These visions were not merely ideological positions. They were also temporal projects that sought to organise an uncertain present, reinterpret colonial memory, and project different possibilities for postcolonial life.

The thesis situates these debates within a longer history of Korean temporal thought, spanning premodern moral and cyclical conceptions of time, late nineteenth-century reformist ideas of progress, and colonial experiences of suspended or foreclosed futurity. Theoretically, the proposed Ph.D. thesis draws on Reinhart Koselleck’s Futures Past, Rebecca Bryant and Daniel M. Knight’s modes of temporality in The Anthropology of the Future, and Graf and Herzog’s typology of futures. Methodologically, it combines Qualitative historical discourse analysis with intellectual history, examining selected political writings, literary texts, poetry anthologies, newspapers and public discourse from 1945 to 1950.

By placing temporality at the centre of analysis, this project contests retrospective readings of inevitability. It reconstructs the “Liberation Space” as a contested arena in which Korean intellectuals imagined, organised, and struggled over possible postcolonial futures before many of those futures were narrowed or foreclosed.