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“He Rests from His Labors”: Racialized Recreation and Missionary Science in Colonial Korea

“He Rests from His Labors”: Racialized Recreation and Missionary Science in Colonial Korea This article examines how Anglo‐American evangelicals in colonial Korea employed racialized understandings of the environment to justify a culture of recreation and health. In the metropole and periphery, missionary researchers studying climate, geography, and public health asserted a science‐based injunction to rest that was intended to maintain a population of evangelical workers. The production of this scientific research, external to the Japanese colonial state, allowed the missionary community to establish a rationale for collective segregation from the local populations they sought to save. In Korea, this dynamic is profiled through the history of a missionary resort at Sorai beach. Initially believed to have contributed to the suicide of an evangelical worker in 1895, within a few years the Sorai area rapidly transformed. In step with the broader culture of summer recreation that emerged in Korea during the 1910s and 1920s, the missionaries recast Sorai from a deleterious space into a site of strategic and devotional rest. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png positions Duke University Press

“He Rests from His Labors”: Racialized Recreation and Missionary Science in Colonial Korea

positions , Volume 29 (2) – May 1, 2021

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References (108)

Copyright
Copyright 2021 by Duke University Press
ISSN
1067-9847
eISSN
1527-8271
DOI
10.1215/10679847-8852111
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This article examines how Anglo‐American evangelicals in colonial Korea employed racialized understandings of the environment to justify a culture of recreation and health. In the metropole and periphery, missionary researchers studying climate, geography, and public health asserted a science‐based injunction to rest that was intended to maintain a population of evangelical workers. The production of this scientific research, external to the Japanese colonial state, allowed the missionary community to establish a rationale for collective segregation from the local populations they sought to save. In Korea, this dynamic is profiled through the history of a missionary resort at Sorai beach. Initially believed to have contributed to the suicide of an evangelical worker in 1895, within a few years the Sorai area rapidly transformed. In step with the broader culture of summer recreation that emerged in Korea during the 1910s and 1920s, the missionaries recast Sorai from a deleterious space into a site of strategic and devotional rest.

Journal

positionsDuke University Press

Published: May 1, 2021

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