ABSTRACT
Conversion literature (chŏnhyang sosŏl) emerged in colonial Korea after Korean leftists in the 1930s began to recant their political beliefs under pressure from state authorities. Instead of presuming a given individual subjectivity that conversion literature, with its (auto)biographical style of writing, reveals, this chapter considers how conversion literature engaged with the colonial state’s targeting of interiority. More specifically, it suggests that conversion literature emerged as a reaction to the biographical writings and representations of Korean socialists produced under the colonial state, the production of which was in turn a part of the larger wartime shift in how the Japanese empire managed its marginalized populations. By examining conversion literature published by writers Yi Kiyŏng, Han Sorya, and Ch’ae Mansik in the late 1930s, the chapter argues that the interiority exhibited in conversion literature betrays the contradiction of wartime Japanese colonialism that simultaneously affirmed and negated the selfhood of the colonized subject.
