Korean Literature across Colonial Modernity and Cold War

Extract

“East Asia” was one of the regions produced by cold war regimes of knowledge and incorporated into the post-1945 formation of multidisciplinary area studies in the United States. While the study of China and Japan has a much longer, pre-1945 history in the United States and Europe, other than an occasional book (often by a missionary or professional traveler), Korea was largely elided from the imaginings that were patched together to form the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discourse on what used to be called the Orient. This lack of a scholarly tradition may explain, in part, why the study of Korean literature (and history) was marginalized in academic departments through the early 1990s, even though the peninsula served as site of the Cold War turned hot during the Korean War (1950–53) and in many ways remains the linchpin organizing the East Asian geopolitical order and the United States military deployments that stretch from CONUS (the contiguous United States) across the Pacific to the DMZ. If Korean literature is belatedly becoming a discipline considered worthy of scholarly inquiry in United States universities, where East Asia until recently meant China and Japan, it is something of an irony that the recognition is taking place at a time when discipline-bound work has begun to reveal its limitations and the area of area studies finds itself in crisis, being interrogated as part of the post-1945 formation of the national security state and confronted by the turn to the transnational.