Scholarship on early Korean Protestantism is locked in an imperialism versus indigenisation divide. This research seminar provides an alternative perspective by examining the construction of Korean Protestant hymnody (1890s-1910s), forged by US missionaries in a Korea on the doorstep of Japanese colonial occupation. By tracing intertextual relations between missionaries’ translated hymns with Koreans’ adaptations, I propose a model of entanglement between missionary and indigenous actors, and between religious and secular motives. I argue that a repertory of sung text that was in many ways complicit with US imperialism came to constitute a key vehicle for expressing new conceptions of self and national community for Koreans experiencing a paradigm shift, caused by the rise of new Pacific empires (the United States and Japan) and the decline of Sinocentrism (including Sinographic literature) in Korea. Crucially, the hymnal refrain of suffering-but-redeemable subjects resonated not only with the evangelical idea of salvation but also with the temporality of colonialism and modernity, oriented toward the transcendence of the present.

Biography

Hannah Hyun Kyong Chang is Lecturer in Korean Studies at the University of Sheffield. She obtained her PhD in Musicology from University of California, Los Angeles. She is a music historian with research focus on historiography, modernity, and music in East Asia and North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently writing a book entitled A Vocal Interior: Korean Hymns and Prayers between US and Japanese Empires. The book-in-progress draws on English-, Korean-, and Japanese-language sources, to trace a history of generative encounters between singer-listeners of uneven power (North American missionaries, Japanese and Korean elites, and Korean subalterns). She is also developing a project on self-styled East Asian modernist composers in the context of the Japanese Empire and the global Cold War. She has published in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Ethnomusicology Forum, and Twentieth-Century Music, among others, and is co-editing a volume titled Music and Sound in Transpacific East Asia with Nancy Rao and Hedy Law.

Hannah Hyun Kyong Chang, Lecturer in Korean Studies, School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield.