• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.47
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• pp.50-73
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• 2009

A tendency to ignore the existence of public space in Korea under the Japanese colonial period seems to be driven from nationalist historiography in which all historical events under the colonial power have to be interpreted in terms of militant controls and resistances against them. Historical approach to mass media of that period has lasted to be saturated with the tendency and forced history students to stick to the nationalist guidelines. Struggles against Japanese imperial power by national-capital-operated newspaper have been a main menu of studies on the period's communication. The media were often hailed as fighting the colonial power for nation's independence. The present thesis aims to criticize the nationalist point of view and to reveal that nationalist interpretations may miss a variety of historical information. Even under the severe surveillance of colonial police some journalists tried either to inform officially or to smuggle into informed groups. The colonized society could experienced fields of public-ness throughout the practices of such as media fields, cultural fields, political fields. Those fields, of course, didn't come from the graceful favor of the colonial power but from the construction of the colonized. The public-ness seemed to be born for the easiness of control, but became later a constructed field of public-ness with which the colonized semiotically wrestled the power and grew a modern type of political (un)consciousness. Depicting what happened just before 815 liberation day in Korea the present paper showed that the less nationalist historiography can render help to those seeking political practices of the colonized in a micro-level.