An Island Adrift

This essay addresses Korean islanders who were produced and disregarded by Japanese colonialism as colonial wasted lives under the Japanese colonial regime on the Korean Peninsula by examining Se-dŏk Ham’s drama “Mui-do Gihaeng” through a conjunction of Zygmunt Bauman’s conception of wasted humans and Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of Auschwitz. As an inevitable and inseparable outcome of the colonial order-building process— particularly in Korean marine territory—colonial wasted lives, rendered d