일제하 기독교계 학교의 항일민족주의 기원과 형성: 선교사 오리엔탈리즘의 근대주의적 전유와 변용

Abstract

The study aims to examine the relevance of anti-Japanese nationalism in mission schools to missionary orientalism in the early stage of the Japanese colonial rule in Korea. It pays particular attention to Western orientalism invented by American missionaries to Korea in tracing an origin and formation of anti-Japanese nationalism by mission school students. The missionary orientalism as a Western epistemological framework was appropriated and transformed in educational sphere by a Korean reformist group seeking Western reformism who was inclined to be pro-American and interested in renovating old feudalism in traditional Korea. The missionaries’ education, policies, rules, and practices in the mission field were expected to motivate Korean students to produce not only a Christian human type but also a modernized human type which contributes to build their independent modern nation. In the colonial era, mission-educated Koreans began to recognize inherent contradictions of Japanese colonialism in light of their self-reliance and liberation education and to set the stage for resistance movements for national sovereignty. This article deals with three points. First, it clarifies the concept and nature of missionary orientalism and discusses the backgrounds of converting missionary orientalism to modernistic framework. Considering the conditions in which reform-minded Korean intellectuals encounter the missionary perceptions of the Orient, it explores how they attempted to accept and transform them. Second, the research examines how educational phenomena in mission schools provided a channel to interconnect premodern Korean situations with the Western modernity. It discusses characteristics of the modernity in the perspectives of self-reliance and liberating knowledge. Last, the paper looks at the historical development that Japanese colonial orientalism after the 1910 Japan-Korea Annexation was infiltrated in Korean education with an intention of creating a subordinate human type and investigates the missionaries’ responses on and conflicts with Japanese colonialists’ educational regulations and practices. Particularly, it discloses an orientalistic complicity between Japanese authorities and missionaries by comprehending the two powers’ delicate stances on the outbreak of the 1919 March First Movement in which mission-educated Koreans were involved.