"Amplifying Voices: Auditory Texts In Colonial Korea, 1910-1945"

Jina Kim, East Asian Languages and Literatures, and 2020-21 OHC Faculty Research Fellow "My book project attends to the junction between sound and literature in focusing on works written for radio broadcast from the Japanese Colonial Period. In the chapter “Performing Historical Anecdotes: Yadam Boom on Radio and Stage,” I demonstrate the relationship between yadam as a traditional literary narrative that has oral origins and its remediazation through the advent of the microphone and radio. That remediazation ironically facilitated oral storytelling contests, making Korean language and tradition more audible and often serving a kind of pedagogical purpose for the Korean listeners—who, in the late 1930s, were colonial subjects living under a Japanese language soundscape."