The Northern Region of Korea: History, Identity, and Culture

Description

The residents of the three northern provinces of Korea have long had cultural and linguistic characteristics that have marked them as distinct from their brethren in the central area near the capital and in the southern provinces. The making and legitimating of centralized Korean nation-states over the centuries, however, have marginalized the northern region and its distinct subjectivities. Contributors to this book address the problem of amnesia regarding this distinct subjectivity of the northern region of Korea in contemporary, historical, and cultural discourses, which have largely been dominated by grand paradigms, such as modernization theory, the positivist perspective, and Marxism. Through the use of storytelling, linguistic analysis, and journal entries from turn-of-the-century missionaries and traveling Russians in addition to many varieties of unconventional primary sources, the authors creatively explore unfamiliar terrain while examining the culture, identity, and regional distinctiveness of the northern region and its people. They investigate how the northern part of the Korean peninsula developed and changed historically from the early Choson to the colonial period and come to a consensus regarding the importance of regionalism as a vital factor in historical transformation, especially in regard to Korea's tumultuous modern era. Contents Maps, Figures, and Tables Acknowledgments Editor’s Note Introduction: Thinking Through Region - Sun Joo Kim 1. Residence and Foreign Relations in the Peninsular Northeast During the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries - Kenneth R. Robinson 2. Chosŏn-Qing Relations and the Society of P’yŏngan Province During the Late Chosŏn Period - Kwon Naehyun 3. Regional Identities of Northern Literati: A Comparative Study of P’yŏngan and Hamgyŏng Provinces - Jang Yoo-Seung 4. The Shadow of Anonymity: The Depiction of Northerners in Eighteenth-Century “Hearsay Accounts” (kimun) - Jung Min 5. P’yŏngan Dialect and Regional Identity in Chosŏn Korea - Paek Doo-Hyeon 6. Dialect, Orthography, and Regional Identity: P’yŏngan Christians, Korean Spelling Reform, and Orthographic Fundamentalism - Ross King 7. From Periphery to a Transnational Frontier: Popular Movements in the Northwestern Provinces, 1896–1904 - Yumi Moon 8. Subversive Narratives: Hwang Sunwŏn’s P’yŏngan Stories - Bruce Fulton 9. The Missionary Presence in Northern Korea before WWII: Human Investment, Social Significance, and Historical Legacy - Donald N. Clark 10. The Northern Region of Korea as Portrayed in Russian Sources, 1860s–1913 - German Kim and Ross King 11. Images of the North in Occupied Korea, 1905–1945 - Mark E. Caprio Glossary Bibliography Contributors Index