Leaving Home: Women, Writing, And Travel In Colonial Korea

This presentation will examine writings on travels, broadly defined, by woman writers from Colonial Korea. Colonial occupation enabled glamorous world tours for some women, while others experienced forced relocations to China, Japan, and beyond. Each of these possibilities helped constitute and played off senses of the domestic, both as family home and as nation or homeland. Domesticity thus had physical and geographical components, but was more radically about locating identities amidst shifting circumstances. Using these senses of domesticity as a lens, this talk explores a juncture between travelogue, conditions surrounding publication and readership, and use of periodicals as a medium, in order to shed light on intricacies of capitalism and social change in the Colonial era.