Introduction

Korea's relationship with various colonial powers provides a backdrop to all the essays in this book. Recent writings on gender and colonial discourse tell us a great deal about the workings of gendered colonialism and its legacies. But although these studies are useful, they have focused almost exclusively on European colonialism. Hardly any work has been produced on multiple colonialisms in East Asia. This elision skews our understanding of gender in the colonial and post-colonial context, centering and even privileging European colonialism as a universalized subject of intellectual inquiry. The erasure of Japanese colonialism in Asia racializes the production of knowledge and colonizes the critical terrain.