Proletarian realities and leftist literature of 1920s and 1930s Colonial Korea

This chapter revisits the prioritization of class by the Korean Artist Proletarian Federation (KAPF) as an avant-garde attempt to intervene in existing frames of literary and political representations. As an umbrella organization for a leftist collective in the 1920s and 1930s, KAPF led experimentations in literature, criticism, theater, film, and art by attracting an unprecedented amount of attention to the material conditions of lower-class life, including abject poverty, oppression, class contention, and migration. This chapter overviews the rise and fall of the proletarian literary movement while focusing on how it intervened in the mainstream cultural norms of the time.