Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea, edited by Haerin Shin, is now available for purchase in our store. Online subscribers can read the full-length version of the introduction at the Telos Online website.
While Korea’s history as a modern nation-state has always been a tumultuous reel of socio-political unrest, never has it drawn the globe’s attention to the degree and extent to which the press coverage of the past two years attests. South Korea’s candlelight demonstrations in the fall of 2016 were widely regarded as a newly arisen form of celebratory civil protest culture, and news of the progressive party’s subsequent rise to power stood out amid the global turn toward conservative politics. Meanwhile, with North Korea’s nuclear threat becoming a palpable reality, media outlets began clamoring with predictions of a major military outbreak across the Pacific. (I remember being inundated by concerned emails from acquaintances abroad during my breaks in South Korea last year.) Then came the dramatic shift toward prospects of denuclearization and North–South collaboration this past summer. Millions watched in awe as Kim Jong Un took President Moon’s hand and walked over the Military Demarcation Line. The meeting in Singapore was viewed with skepticism in the United States, but more pertinently such attempts to reestablish channels of communication were greeted warmly in South Korea.
Irrespective of whether the proposed principle of “complete, verifiable, and irreversible” denuclearization is upheld or whether the projected goal of reunification is realized anytime soon, the developments in the summer of 2018 marked an unprecedented turn in Korea’s history and its positionality within the larger fabrics of global geopolitics in that the two administrations stepped away from their long-held stance of viewing each other as illegitimate derivations. From internal power struggles in the years immediately following liberation to the trauma of division and the outbreak of the Korean War, to the ensuing decades of destitution and military tension across the borders, to the economic gap that increasingly set the North and South apart in the last decades of the twentieth century, Korea’s identification as a nation-state (or rather nation-states, plural) has always hinged upon the question of legitimacy—namely, which side deserves the title of authentic successor to Korea’s precedent polity, against not only the tenets of colonialism but also the traditional value systems and practices that were blamed for having rendered the country vulnerable to external encroachments. The Kim family’s power rests upon its claim to the Paektu (Korea’s tallest mountain, regarded as sacred in folk and historical tradition) heritage, linking the mythical descent of Korea’s founding deity with tales of Kim Il Sung’s ventures as a leader in the anticolonial resistance.[1] Claiming the title Chosŏn as its regional successor (North Korea refers to itself as Pukchosŏn, meaning Northern Chosŏn), North Korean politics foregrounds ethnic solidarity and disavows external alliances as a form of imperial subjugation (as evident in the widely used catchphrase “uri minjok kkiri,” or “by and with our own people”). South Korean administrations, on the other hand, have positioned themselves as the true advocates of the people’s will in the spirit of democracy. As such, breaking away from colonial rhetoric means severing ties with Chosŏn’s premodern form of governance and isolationist defense against Western capitalism. Despite their differences, the two Koreas’ divergent trajectories branch out of a shared desire to de-link their identities from colonial modernity and its hierarchical imposition of differential values onto differences in socio-cultural and political practice, whether through categorical rejection or the pursuit of competitive equity.
While the structure of the North–South conflict had been undeniably propelled and sustained by exogenous factors, such as the colonial experience and the Cold War paradigm, the seemingly disparate stances that resulted in division uniformly stem from an internal struggle to negotiate and disavow—albeit in different ways—the persistent effects of coloniality. Here, I use the term coloniality to accentuate the present-progressive nature of this struggle, not only in the political domain but also across the social, cultural, and economic arenas. Bruce Cumings aptly asserts that “we can no longer use the term ‘modern’ as a sign of tribute, or progress as a sign of approbation. . . . The modern is not a sign of superiority but a mark, a point, on a rising and falling scale.”[2] However, the implications of epistemological and ontological hierarchies embedded in the term “modern” cannot be readily dismissed as the follies of a defunct discourse. Regardless of whether the external trappings of modernity have been secured or not, the legacies of the colonial past place Korea among what Nayoung Aimee Kwon calls “the rest” (non-Western and therefore marginal): those “who were modern but were denied full recognition as such in the hegemonic but all-too-provincial logic that equated modernity with the West.”[3] Under such conditions, modernity becomes a mechanism not of identification but of self-alienation, constantly demanding yet permanently precluding any claim to authenticity, as we see in the vicious cycle of mutual vilification that characterizes the dynamics between the two Koreas.
Of course, the complex intents that undergird the vicissitudes of the Korean peninsula’s past half-century cannot be reduced to fit any absolute comparison, but it is important to note that the dissensus between the North and South revolves around clashing approaches to what modernity means, why it matters (if it does), and how it could be reclaimed on one’s own terms against the coloniality of power. The problem of the North–South divide, in this light, must be identified not only in its violent repercussions but also in the resultant reproduction of the very episteme that both sides set out to disavow: the view that the otherness of the counterpart is fundamentally erroneous, which therefore must be denounced in order for the nation to rightfully be, even at the price of sacrificing the lives and welfare of its constituents. In other words, the history of division showcases the greatest fallacy of coloniality in its prioritization of the nation-state as an illusive agent of its own right over the lived reality of the people. Countless countries suffered a similar fate during the Cold War years, but as the only divided country (or countries) remaining on earth, Korea is surely one of the more unique cases where the necropolitics of national identity has become a fatally mundane reality.
Identification is by nature a form of exclusion. The modernist compulsion to delineate the nation-state inevitably stratifies not only beyond but within borders, alienating those who do not possess the means to know and be one with the identity they are expected to enact. In her October 2017 op-ed essay in the New York Times, International Man Booker Prize–winning novelist Han Kang condemns foreign news coverage of South Koreans’ “mysterious attitude toward North Korea” for instilling the misguided notion that the former have grown numb to the latter’s militaristic attacks due to prolonged years of exposure. Attributing such oversight to the media’s sweeping characterization of North Korea as a monstrous organism and the conflation of the leadership’s agenda with the subjects under its rule, Han makes a cogent point about how there is a need to “distinguish between dictatorships and those who suffer under them . . . to respond to circumstances holistically, going beyond the dichotomy of good and evil.”[4] While her indignation is primarily directed at the carelessness with which media outlets in third-party countries speak of war and its fears without any inkling of their tangible reality for the peninsula’s inhabitants who live with it on a daily basis, her point also illuminates the persistence of coloniality and its discontent as a living, breathing manifestation of nationalist identity politics. While it would be premature at this juncture to expect any immediate deliverables from the Panmunjom Declaration, its significance must therefore be found more in the sense of parity that the two sides afforded each other than in any symbolic gestures made by the summits.[5] The state of current events by no means suggests a clear path ahead, but I offer this reading in the hope that we may be witnessing a tentative step toward a shared futurity that stands free of the compulsion to seek out and rigidly adhere to exclusionary and proprietary values within and beyond the peninsula. As such, this special issue of Telos calls for a reconfiguration of the meaning and value of modernity as a way of challenging the episteme of progress that has been plaguing the globe for so long, bringing the timely topic of Korea and the rapid shifts it has been undergoing of late to bear upon the here and now. As a journal that has just celebrated fifty years of rigorous engagement with critical theory, Telos is ideally positioned to situate the discursive foci of the collected essays within the larger context of globality. Sublating easy binaries, the essays assembled here explore the cultural, historical, theoretical, literary, and political matrix of entanglements that demarcate Korea’s contemporaneity over a wide spectrum of topics, including the Korean War, the history of division and the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), the Korean Wave and the culture industry, Korean cinema, affective identity, and body politics.
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Brought together in a collaborative endeavor, the essays in this issue tackle a variety of topics and themes that converge upon a shared objective: representing, critically reflecting on, and reconfiguring Korea’s modernity beyond its colonial implications. From the division to the Korean War, the bifurcated trajectories of compressed modernity across the DMZ, and contemporaneous manifestations of such historical legacies, the essays here present alternative perspectives that challenge ontological, epistemological, and ethical binaries that conflate difference with differential values. Even with the summer of 2018 drawing to a close, the Korean peninsula continues to see developments that attend to liminal agencies. In August, separated families in North and South Korea reunited for what may have been the last time in the case of the majority of participants, since the generation that experienced the division first hand is now advancing in age. The unified (North-South) women’s basketball team won a silver medal in the 2018 Asian Games, garnering praise not only for their achievement but more for the collaborative effort made to address the problems that tainted the unified women’s hockey team in the PyeongChang Olympics earlier this year. On the other hand, despite winning the gold medal, South Korea’s baseball and soccer teams fell under public scrutiny, raising suspicion regarding organization issues and discontent with certain players’ performances in connection to the government’s promise to grant the team members exemption from mandatory military service. The controversy, in turn, gave rise to public demands to amend the military exemption clause and reflect the shifts in the cultural topography. Disciplinary demarcations of “outstanding accomplishments” that deserve to be credited as national contributions and therefore qualify for exemption do not extend to popular culture. In principle, winning the first prize in an international classical music contest would count toward said qualification whereas achievements of greater fiscal magnitude and public impact, such as BTS’s Love Yourself 結 Answer (ranked first on the Billboard 200 album chart as of September 2018), would remain unrecognized under such provisions. The events that transpired over the past month alone show how the lines between high and low culture, privilege and hard-earned prestige, and the collective and the individual are being actively reconfigured in light of Korea’s past and toward new prospects. Riding the tail end but also portending the coming winds of major political, social, historical, and cultural shifts in Korea, this issue posits approaches to modernity and alternative formations of the peninsula’s future within the larger context of globality.
Notes
1. For more on the Kim family’s deployment of the Paektu heritage theory as a means of political idolization, see Yŏng-gwŏn Yi, Paektu hyŏlt’ong ŭi mirae: Pukhan 3-tae sesŭp chŏngkwŏn ŭi chaktong wŏlli [The Operational Mechanism of the Succession of Power over Three Generations in North Korea] (Seoul: Iji Ch’ulp’an, 2015); Chang Hee Kim, “Making History for the Baekdu Lineage in North Korea,” Journal of Korean Political and Diplomatic History 39, no. 1 (2017): 147–78; and Gyeri Pak, “Paekdu hyontol usanghwa ŭI sinhot’an ” [Signs of the Paekdu Heritage Idolization Project: ], Unified Korea 354 (2013), among others.
2. Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 10.
3. Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2015), p. 11.
4. Han Kang, “While the U.S. Talks of War, South Korea Shudders,” New York Times, October 7, 2017,.
5. For the full text of the joint statement, see “Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Unification of the Korean Peninsula,” Reuters, April 27, 2018. Critics have noted that the terms of the Panmunjom Declaration are more symbolic than pragmatic, doing little more than reprising the content of the October 4 Declaration in 2007. For a more detailed comparison of the two, see “The Panmunjom Declaration between North and South and the October 4 Declaration 11 Years Ago” [in Korean], VOA Korea, April 27, 2018.
