Narrative Politics, Nationalism and Korean History

Abstract

This chapter considers how narratives of nation affect politics and intellectual enquiry in Korea but present various problems for outsiders who try to write about contemporary or historical Korea. Concurrently, it engages the issue of representation, which has become an important issue for historians and area studies scholars. In a nation-state where the master narrative is contested, what would seem to be harmless 'academic' analysis can become political dynamite? Indeed, to provide material with which to revise the master narrative is to attack the legitimacy of the state and the socio-political formation upon which it rests. The chapter also considers the elasticity of nationalism as a concept and its many uses, its essentially constructed nature and its linkages to a Western Universalist concept of world history. According to South Korea's master narrative, the Korean nation-state came into being in 1948, three years after liberation from Japanese colonial rule. Keywords: Japanese colonial rule; Korean history; master narrative; nationalism; political dynamite