Nationalism

South Korea’s nationalism and political history have been shaping each other since the late nineteenth century. While anti-colonial nationalism has been the most important element of contemporary South Korean political identity, the South Korean state has also utilized and altered the forms and contents of South Korean nationalism. Key events in South Korean political history such as colonial experiences, national division, the Korean War, authoritarian rule, democratization, and globalization have been interacting with evolving discourses of nationalism in South Korean society. This chapter reviews the historical development of Korean nationalism, while emphasizing the interactions between nationalism and political history. It also suggests that Korean nationalism is at a crossroads amid democratic consolidation and globalization.

Incongruity of Nationalisms? Interactions between Korean National History and American Historians of Korea, the 1910s to 1980s

The heuristic starting point for this paper is a critical approach to the enterprise of modern historiography per se, based on the understanding of it as inherently bound by teleological epistemology. While “Korean nationalism” is the usual vantage point for the critique of modern Korean historiography, the current article attempts to reverse this analytical perspective and re-assess a number of attempts to write on Korean history by US-based historians of Korea in the 1910s–1980s as reflections of inherently self-centric picture of the world. In this Eurocentric picture, traditional Korea was locked into a historical trajectory via which “modernity” was unachievable.

The Feminization of Translation

The awarding of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize to Deborah Smith’s English translation of The Vegetarian brought global recognition to emergent Korean literature, but domestically it has sparked outrage among numerous Korean scholars who believe the literal inaccuracies in Smith’s translation have brought about a “national disgrace.” Situating this overheated reaction in the larger context of the colonial history of Korean nationalism, this article points out the irony that the “noble cause” of anti-imperialist resistance has historically led to the silencing of women’s voices in the context of preserving and transmitting an idea of quintessential Korean culture to an international audience. Such nationalist tendencies demand the “feminization” of the translator—requesting her to be barely visible while performing a self-effacing humility in deference to the putatively “original” culture. In contrast to this tendency, reading Han’s original and Smith’s translation together makes visible the damages that both colonization and nationalism have inflicted on the representation of female experiences. In the end, what truly scandalizes nationalist critics is not the failure of the translator to accurately convey Korean experiences, but the success of the translation in conveying an area of Korean experience they tend to neglect: that of female subjectivity.

Rewriting the Feminine Construction of a Nation in Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller

This essay highlights the way Keller’s novel, Comfort Woman (1997) explores the connection between women’s sexual bodies, colonialism and Korean nationalism. Through the resistance of heroic women characters against patriarchal definitions and feminization of a colonized nation, Keller narrates subversive feminist resistance to humiliating inscriptions of patriarchy and colonialism onto the sexual bodies of women. The text is closely analysed using tools of literary devices, in particular, subversive strategies and the idea of silences as a tool and a theme to convey the unspoken and the unspeakable. Soon Hyo’s passive silences as a comfort woman in the comfort camps and her transformation later to paranormal articulations as a shaman is interpreted as powerful forms of resistance against patriarchy’s inscription upon her body. Her silent passivity, re-interpreted as a form of active resistance becomes more meaningful as she wrestles back the identities and recognition for the thousands of comfort women that would otherwise be forgotten. Comfort Woman inquires into the links between languages, silences and subjectivity, colonial domination and Korean nationalism, sexuality and nation, resisting any attempts at separating the links. Keller invoked the power of performance and silences in the form of “strange” articulations and tropes which were culturally specific as subversive means of re-telling her story and inscribing new meanings onto women’s sexual bodies, thus rewriting the feminine constructions of a nation.

Contextualizing Revolutionary Operas

Chapter 5 is the second of three chapters on “revolutionary operas.” It explores how revolutionary operas reflect and are distinct from parallel genres in the Soviet Union, as well as how they may have been influenced by Chinese model works. It shows how ideology, including Soviet socialist realism and North Korean nationalism, and also collective creation and “seed theory,” is embedded in operas. It discusses the involvement of the North Korean leadership, and in particular Kim Jong Il, in opera creation, and explores the impact of comments made by the leadership after the premieres of the first three operas. The chapter asks what was known about opera in Korea before 1945, offering a discussion of the traditional genre of p’ansori, its twentieth-century ch’anggŭk staged equivalent, and how these two genres—and specific musicians associated with them who moved from Seoul to Pyongyang and continued their careers there into the 1960s—fared. These older forms were effectively stopped dead when Kim Il Sung remarked that they were reminiscent of a time when people traveled by donkey and wore horsehair hats, and, after the five revolutionary operas, they were replaced by “people’s operas” in the new, revolutionary opera mold.