MODERN KOREA AND ITS OTHERS: Perceptions of the Neighbouring Countries and Korean Modernity | By Vladimir Tikhonov | Pacific Affairs
MODERN KOREA AND ITS OTHERS: Perceptions of the Neighbouring Countries and Korean Modernity | By Vladimir Tikhonov
Routledge Advances in Korean Studies, 33. London; New York: Routledge, 2016. xiv, 228 pp. US$160.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-138-85552-6.
Vladimir Tikhonov, the Russian-Korean historian better known in South Korea as Bak No-ja, has published an engaging analysis of Korean perspectives on the country’s bordering countries in the roughly half-century before its 1945 liberation from Japanese colonial rule. This is ultimately a study of Korean nationalism, a topic endowed with plentiful scholarship, although not as much recently in English. Tikhonov’s work adds new insights by focusing on views on other nationalities and by drawing extensively from literary sources.
The book devotes two chapters each, in order, to Russia, China, and Japan, with the first chapter providing a general overview of often divergent perceptions that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, and the second chapter mining mostly novels for evidence of how such views developed in the colonial period. What results is a symmetrical argument: For each country, there emerged an initial “othering” process of establishing what Koreans, in developing their own sense of collective self, were not. This discursive formation was largely driven by concerns over imperialism, but was eventually joined by countervailing sentiments that regarded the neighbouring civilization in question as a model of (alternative) modernity, particularly as anti-colonial or anti-imperialist revolutionary movements came to prevail in Russia and China. Such fluid ambiguity, plurality, and variety, which the author characterizes as a mixture of “fears and desires” (182–183), are explained through plentiful historical contextualization, such as Koreans’ interaction with Russian emigres in Manchuria, or the disdain for Chinese migrants within Korea.
The second chapter then proceeds to examine certain themes in literary works, such as the problem of Korean-Japanese intermarriage during the wartime mobilization years of the late 1930s and early 1940s, or the sexualized demonization of Chinese merchants. In conjunction with the opening chapters in each couplet that draw considerably from non-fictional accounts like newspaper articles, these chapters present a rich tapestry of cultural and intellectual expression in this era and advance the book’s core argument that Korean nationalism, which reflected the striving for a “subaltern, peripheral modernity” (4) given the political circumstances, resulted not only from internal traditions, realities, and constructs, but also from the formulation of a collective identity in relation to external groups. This is certainly not new, but Tikhonov draws from novel sources and suggests that these ideological formations regarding Korea’s neighbours had a much more substantial and enduring impact than what is commonly acknowledged. Both of these strengths, however, can also present pitfalls, or at least further questioning and concerns.
First, this book’s ample analysis of literature does not constitute literary analysis. The stories are mined by a historian for historical purposes, so there is no interpretive deconstruction, and little coverage of characters, narrative devices, symbolic gestures, etc. within the works’ internal dynamics. To be sure, Tikhonov’s overriding goal is to demonstrate how fictionalized depictions reflected and helped to construct Korean perspectives on neighbouring peoples and societies. The challenge remains, though, of providing more than a survey of various expressions, but to demonstrate prevailing or common sentiments that reflected the historical circumstances of the time. It is uncertain how well the author follows his own caveats about literature’s limitations as historical sources (153), and it would take a specialist to provide a more definitive evaluation of the representativeness of the works that Tikhonov examines.
More manageable is to locate Tikhonov’s study in the historiography of Korea’s ideological and cultural history of this period. As noted above, Korean nationalism, in regard to the outside world, has enjoyed plentiful scholarly attention, but most of this has focused, understandably, on Japan, as well as on China, particularly the ideological and political interactions with the Chinese republican and communist movements. Tikhonov, however, emphasizes the impact of Chinese migrant communities on Koreans’ views. For Japan, this book does not add significantly to the proliferation of studies on colonial intellectual and cultural history, even on the theme of ethnic intermarriage. One can also suggest that, given the realities of colonial rule, it is nearly impossible to treat views on Japan as a comparable topic to those of China and Russia.
When it comes to Russia, however, this book’s contributions are on very solid ground, at least in the English-language scholarship. The author’s access to Russian sources, including influential literary works, provide a revelatory analysis of Russia’s wide-ranging cultural impact in Korea at the time—as a source and model for a semi-western, albeit alternative, path to modernity, and as a target of phobias for communism that gradually enveloped the state-dominated colonial cultural sphere, an ideological construct that very well could have fueled enmity, in some quarters, toward the Soviet Union in the post-liberation period.
Indeed a consciousness of the post-colonial developments looms over the book. The problem is that the accumulated Korean perspectives on the neighbouring “other,” given their variety, could just as well have worked against the particular manifestations of nationalism that came to prevail in the two Koreas—from Juche, the anti-Japanese backlash, and anti-Chinese chauvinism to pro-Russian and pro-Chinese revolutionism, racist opposition to intermarriage, or sexual subservience under imperialism. In other words, an inescapable but justifiable teleology pervades the author’s coverage, though this appears explicitly in only the final sentences of chapters and in the book’s Conclusion, when Tikhonov considers historical legacies all the way to the end of the twentieth century.
In any case, despite the proliferation of parenthetical notes (ostensibly a mixture of the social science and history styles, with minimal footnotes), which to some readers will be distracting, this book is highly readable, providing a thorough and textured intellectual history, with due consideration of historical context always at the forefront of the author’s concerns. It also offers an enlightening introduction to both well-known and more obscure authors and their works. These are some of the many qualities that make this book highly recommended.
Kyung Moon Hwang
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA
pp. 372-374
Spirituality, Mind-Body, Gender, Ecology, Ageing, Peace, Scrapbook (in English and Korean)
