Center for Korean Studies hosts conference on colonial Korea on Feb. 16-17

The Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa will hold a conference titled “Tapestry of Modernity: Urban Cultural Landscapes of Colonial Korea, 1920s-1930s," on February 16-17, 2012, at the Center for Korean Studies Auditorium.

Within the framework of "multiple modernities," this conference will explore multi-layered arrays of Korean modernity by looking at different areas in society and culture that went through a metamorphosis as Korea reinvented itself as a modern state-nation during the colonial period. Individual conference papers will explore various forms of selectivity, creativity, inventiveness, imaginary resourcefulness, and visions of Koreans engaged in crafting their own brands of modernity.

The focus of the conference will be the cultural modernity projects nurtured and cultivated in the urban setting of Korea in the decades of the 1920s and the 1930s, when such modern transformation was most vigorously pursued and propagated and its achievements most visible and vibrant.