KJCKorea
Journal Central

The issue of “regional extinction” is constantly raised, saying that as local youth head to the metropolitan area, the population of the region will decrease and the region will soon become extinct. The premise behind this is that the reason why young people are leaving the region is due to the lack of ‘industry’, and therefore, if ‘industry’ centered on ‘large companies’ develops in the region, jobs will be created, and people will naturally come back to the region. However, there is a growing body of research that suggests that the single answer of “industry” is no longer valid for many of the region’s problems. The idea that if you allocate industries to a region and move workers to the region, they will “take care of themselves” is an old belief from the era of industrialization. However, workers who have migrated to the region to survive have come to realize that labor alone is not enough to root and live in the region. What we must now look at in order to ask the question of local issues is the issue of the invisible sentiment that bridges the gap between ‘industry’ and ‘labor’. In this paper, I analyze the emotions produced by the regional structure of industrialization on workers, focusing on labor novels from the 1990s. It reveals that the regional reorganization of industrialization produces emotions such as disconnection, isolation, and fear among workers in industrial cities, which are related to the geographical/industrial structure of the region itself.

locality, industrial city, shipbuilding, geoje, Bang hyeon-seok, affective geography, labor novel, industrialization