Numbers and Songs－ Colonization Discourse and the Representation of “Koreans” in the 1920s

The purpose of this study is to analyze the discourse of ethnic reform in the 1920s to identify the ways in which ‘Koreans’ were represented as both objects and subjects of reform and the logic behind their representation. The theory of revision ism, which was actively promoted in the private media of the time, such as Gae byeok, Hakjigwang, synthesized a number of disparate ideas and anthropological inquiries, ranging from racial studies and social psychology to German neo-idealist philosophy and Romantic discourses of ethnicity, to imagine and propose a path of revision that was ‘unique’ to the Korean people. The fact that ‘Koreans’ and their lives were represented in the writings of revisionists through ‘numbers’ recorded in various statistical data and through ‘folk songs’ collected in each province is an example of the ideological hybridity of revisionism. The ‘Basic Survey of Jo seon Culture’ project should be seen as an exploration and sharing of ‘ethnicity’ in this sense at the social level. The introduction to each region generally took the form of drawing the boundaries of the region, presenting statistics on the number of lakes and agricultural, fishing, forestry, and mining production, and introducing local folk tales and folk songs. In rough summary, ‘Joseon’ is visualized through numbers, folk tales, and songs.