The Youth Magazine in Early Colonial Korea
This chapter outlines the social, political, and economic conditions that enabled the emergence of a print culture for young readers in colonial Korea. It historicizes this emergence globally and locally, against the backdrop of discourses on the role of youth that circulated among intellectuals and educators in Korea, Japan, and China. With the emergence of the modern political subject, youth came to embody the nation’s aspirations. The figure of the child that emerged a decade later contrasted with this early configuration of the political, non-adult youth. This chapter sets the stage for the book's argument: that children were celebrated as privileged protagonists of the future because, like youth, they were intellectually and emotionally unburdened by the past and ideally situated to build a modern nation. But unlike youth, the new children possessed a child-heart conducive to the colonial project of engineering a new, affectively privileged modern subject.