Paper short abstract:

This paper examines depictions of the Pure White Sect, a religious cult in colonial Korea that became exposed to the public in the late 1930s. The paper argues that the sensational and melodramatic aspects of these accounts at once legitimized and pointed to the limits of colonial modernity.

Paper long abstract:

In the 1930s, strange tales of a religious cult named the Pure White Sect (白白教) spread across Korea. In the span of a few decades, this cult had amassed a large following by promising everlasting prosperity and salvation for its faithful from the coming apocalypse. But in 1937, a series of crimes carried out in its name, including the killing of hundreds of its followers, came to light. Many Japanese and Korean pundits blamed the rise of this cult, among other sects, as residues from the earlier times persistent among the unenlightened masses of Korea, portraying them through stock figures well known in imperial accounts of the colony such as the superstitious Korean woman or the backward peasant. This paper, however, argues that the public's fascination with the Pure White Sect was, in several ways, a contemporary product of the late colonial period -- a time of wartime mobilization, rapid industrialization, and marginalization of the countryside. In this presentation I consider a number of non-fictional and fictional accounts published from the late 1930s onwards to analyze depictions of the scandal and horror of the Pure White Sect in relation to the experiences of colonial modernity. I argue that the sensational and melodramatic aspects of these accounts at once legitimized and pointed to the limits of modernization under colonial rule.