People express and exercise power as much through words as through actions. Yet scholars never have examined systematically how officials and others in the United States actually talked and wrote about Korea, both north and south, during the momentous interwar period. This article unearths crude depictions of the Korean people common in American writings from the 1940s and 1950s, arguing that this rhetoric created and reinforced an unequal power relationship between the United States and Korea. These negative discourses about Koreans, as expressions of American Orientalism, had important implications for u.s.policy in Korea and for the post-war trajectory of developments on the entire Korean peninsula. They also have left a perceptible imprint on English-language scholarship engaging in assessments of Korea ever since.
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Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 3. For works following this tact in areas beyond the Korean peninsula, see, for example, Seth Jacobs, The Universe Unraveling: American Foreign Policy in Cold War Laos (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2012); Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). For one exception in the case of Korea, see Michael D. Shin, “Major Trends of Korean Historiography in the us,” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 3, no. 1 (2003): 151–75.
Jeremi Suri, “The Cold War, Decolonization, and Global Social Awakenings: Historical Intersections,” Cold War History 6, no. 3 (August 2006): 353.
See, for instance, Bernard Lewis, “The Question of Orientalism,” The New York Review of Books 11 (June 24, 1982): 49–56; Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (Woodstock, ny: Overlook Press, 2006). For longer overviews of Orientalism and its critics, see, among others, Ziad Elmarsafy, Anna Bernard, and David Atwell (eds.), Debating Orientalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Daniel Martin Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007); Hsu-Ming Teo, “Orientalism: An Overview,” Australian Humanities Review 54 (2013): 1–20. Edward W. Said partially responded to some of his critics in “Orientialism Reconsidered,” Postcolonial Criticism, B.J. Moore-Gilbert, Gareth Stanton, and Willy Maley, eds. (New York: Longman, 1997), 126–44.
Barbara Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006).
X [George F. Kennan], “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 25 (July 1947): 566–82.
Bruce Cumings, “The Assumptions Did It,” in In Uncertain Times: American Foreign Policy after the Berlin Wall and 9/11, Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeffrey W. Legro, eds. (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2011), 131–49. Cumings’ arguments do not warrant wholesale agreement. To be sure, the Korean War was a civil conflict, but the conflict also was deeply entwined with international politics. Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin’s approval of Kim Il Sung’s war plan, for example, was a major turning point in the road leading to North Korea’s 25 June 1950 attack on South Korea. For an alternative perspective on the origins of the Korean War which challenges many of Cumings’ arguments, see William Stueck, “Revisionism and the Korean War,” The Journal of Conflict Studies 22, no. 1 (Spring 2002), http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/jcs/article/view/365/576 (accessed 30 November 2014).
Elder Olson, “On Value Judgments in the Arts,” Critical Inquiry 1, no. 1 (September 1974): 71–90.
Wulf Kansteiner, “Hayden White’s Critique of the Writing of History,” in Historiography: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, Robert M. Burns, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 390–93.
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Dane Kennedy, “Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24, no. 3 (September 1996): 357.
Suri, “The Cold War, Decolonization, and Global Social Awakenings,” 353.
Richard H. Minear, “Orientalism and the Study of Japan,” The Journal of Asian Studies 39, no. 3 (May 1980): 507–17.
Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 45–86.
Gregg A. Brazinsky, Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 255.
Ibid., p. 120.
Ibid., p. 3.
Ibid., p. 5.
Ibid., p. 2.
Ibid., p. 109.
Ibid., p. 11.
Ibid., p. 256.
George M. McCune, “Occupation Politics in Korea,” Far Eastern Survey 15, no. 3 (13 February 1946): 37.
Ibid., p. 173.
Ibid., p. 222.
Ibid., p. 6.
Ibid., pp. 13–14.
Ibid., p. 28.
Ibid., p. 180.
Ibid., p. 258.
Dae-Sook Suh, “A Preconceived Formula for Sovietization: The Communist Takeover of North Korea,” in The Anatomy of Communist Takeovers, Thomas T. Hammond, ed. (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1975), 475–89.
Andrei Lankov, From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea, 1945–1960 (London: Hurst & Company, 2002), ix.
Andrei Lankov, Crisis in North Korea: The Failure of De-Stalinization (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), 7–9. See also Adam Cathcart and Charles Kraus, “Internationalist Culture in North Korea, 1945–1950,” Review of Korean Studies 11, no. 3 (September 2008): 123–48.
Ibid., p. 194.
Kennedy, “Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory,” p. 353.
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People express and exercise power as much through words as through actions. Yet scholars never have examined systematically how officials and others in the United States actually talked and wrote about Korea, both north and south, during the momentous interwar period. This article unearths crude depictions of the Korean people common in American writings from the 1940s and 1950s, arguing that this rhetoric created and reinforced an unequal power relationship between the United States and Korea. These negative discourses about Koreans, as expressions of American Orientalism, had important implications for u.s.policy in Korea and for the post-war trajectory of developments on the entire Korean peninsula. They also have left a perceptible imprint on English-language scholarship engaging in assessments of Korea ever since.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 1197 | 262 | 23 |
Full Text Views | 318 | 34 | 5 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 266 | 86 | 12 |