A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under U.S. Occupation

With the collapse of the Japanese Empire in August 1945, the Korean peninsula erupted with hopes and dreams that had been bottled up for nearly forty years. Kornel Chang’s new book, A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2025), tells the story of how Koreans—from political leaders and activists to ordinary peasants, workers, and women—experienced the shock of liberation, what they thought it might bring, the great expectations, and the opportunities and challenges they faced as a newly emancipated people. The book also looks at how the entry of American forces complicated, and ultimately, narrowed possibilities for liberation. U.S. officials fought over how to best fulfill Korean aspirations and how they should be prioritized among competing objectives in Korea. An eclectic group of American and Korean reformers—New Deal liberals, Christian socialists, and trade unionists—proposed an agenda of democratization and reform as an alternative to the rigid anti-communism of the military high command. Their stories reveal the paths not taken. In telling them, A Fractured Liberation restores contingency to a narrative that looks ahead to war and division as an inevitable endpoint.
Speaker: Kornel Chang, Associate Professor of History and American Studies and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University-Newark