Space and national identity: Yi Kwangsu's vision of Korea during the Japanese empire

My dissertation, "Space and National Identity: Yi Kwangsu's Vision of Korea during the Japanese empire," is an intellectual history of Korean nationalist (minjok, or minzoku) identity formation, inspired by historical memories linked to famous physical locales within the larger Japanese empire. Understanding capitalist development and modernity as a spatial veil sweeping across undeveloped parts of the globe in the 1910s and 20s, I study how the travels of key nationalist Yi Kwangsu (1892-1950) through the Japanese empire (in travelogues like "Short Letters from Tokyo," "Record of Travels in the Diamond Mountains ," and "From Manchuria") as both a colonized intellectual and imperial subject functioned in attempting to stem this tide of change. I examine four specific physical sites which Yi traveled to and wrote about in his efforts to educate the colonial Korean public about their own "national" heritage---Tokyo during the 1910s, the Diamond Mountains (Kumgangsan), the southern Korean seacoast where the Hideyoshi Invasions (1592-8) were fought off, and 1930s Manchuria. In addition to political treatises and fiction set in the urban landscape, Yi wrote commentaries on illustrious historical figures and travelogues through which he attempted to forge a national topography for an "absent" nation which had lost its physical land. Until now, Yi's historical writings in this vein have not really been studied.;Travel for the colonized subject was a different experience than it was for the imperialist Analyzing the four physical sites which Yi visited as a native Korean, my interest is not merely on the material, social and political conditions which compelled him to visit these places, but how each locus as a "memory knot" allowed Yi Kwangsu to objectify a "Korean-ness" with which to stem the tide of modernity and colonization. My research considers how the colonized Korean nationalist's marginalization within the empire, and his negotiation of the development lag between different societies he observed influenced his remapping of Korea's historical past within a changing present. It is a spatial study of the Japanese empire in that it reveals how spatial contestations captured an emerging Korean "national" identity against imperialist claims over the land.