This dissertation examines the relationship between language, power, and public space in two different public student protest movements that began in colonial Korea under Japanese rule, both originating in the southwestern city of Kwangju. In Imperial Lessons, I combine retrospective personal narratives and contemporary documentary sources to analyze how colonial-era Korean student protest was enacted, witnessed, repressed, and remembered by differently-positioned actors.;The 1929--1930 Kwangju Student Movement was the second-largest anti-Japanese protest movement of the colonial period, second only to the March First Movement. In this dissertation, I historicize 1929--1930 activism to reveal how colonial rule and student resistance evolved in complex and mutually constitutive ways throughout the colonial period. I argue that Japanese rule created new spatial conceptions on the Korean peninsula both by transforming local public spaces in Korea and by requiring Koreans to imagine themselves as members of a larger Japanese empire and that it was within this framework that the new subject position of the student protester emerged. Also, by contrasting 1929--1930 student activism to a second, smaller 1943 student movement, I trace how student protesters' relationships to public space, language, and conceptions of their own identities all transformed along with wartime imperial mobilization. Colonial-era student protest provides a window into how both Korean and Japanese residents of colonial Korea not only envisioned Korea's future, but also into how they used language as a tool to inscribe their own competing meanings onto contested public spaces.
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