History of Modern Korea

Catalog description

This course is designed to be a forum for students to engage with critical approaches and debates on the history of modern Korea. History is normally identified as a truthful reconstruction of the past that is endorsed because of its fidelity to factual evidence. In this normative conceptualization of history, however, less attention is paid to the truth that our understanding of the past is informed by current politics and shaped within a given system of representation. This predicament, which faces all historians, is unavoidable in the study of Korean history as well, particularly because the postcolonial division of the two Koreas has conditioned the use and abuse of national history in dealing with contemporary social concerns. In reading and discussing historically significant texts along with relevant theoretical accounts, we will thus attend to the complex relationship between knowledge production and power structures, between an event and its modes of representation. Mindful of the political and epistemological questions involved in the writing and understanding of history, we will examine major events and processes that have (trans)formed modern Korean society: colonization, partition, the Korean War, industrialization, democratization, and globalization. We will also trace how people in Korea, individually and collectively, have been affected by, and have responded to, these historical changes in their everyday lives and beyond. By exploring diverse materials about modern Korean history, we will ultimately seek to locate the “national” issues being addressed—colonial domination, capitalist modernization, the Cold War, and neoliberal restructuring—within broader transnational contexts.