Korean Classics Library: Historical Materials. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. xxi, 230 pp. (Tables.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3281-8.
Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era is composed of an introduction and twelve chapters, each of which contains a translation of a text written by a major Korean writer or intellectual and a translator’s introduction both to the author and the work in question. The essays included in this volume cover a temporal range from 1922 to 1948, with a focus on the 1930s. These essays cover an impressive range of disciplines, topics and concerns, including, among others, nationalism, race, imperialism, capitalism, historiography, gender, socialism, proletarian culture, literary form and history, modernism and realism. Imperatives of Culture will for the first time provide an English-speaking readership access to the most important intellectual currents making up the Japanese colonial period in Korea (1910–1945).
The essays by key colonial-period intellectual and literary figures such as Yi Kwangsu, Ch’oe Namsŏn, Paek Namun, Kang Kyŏngae, Chŏng Inbo, Mun Ilp’yŏng, and Ch’oe Chaesŏ are central not only to an understanding of pre-1945 Korea, but postcolonial Korea as well. As Seung-Ah Lee points out in her introduction to Chŏng Inbo’s mid-1930s essay, Chŏng’s tracing of 5000 years of Chosŏn’s ŏl (spirit), influenced President Park Chung Hee’s formulation of nationalism in the 1960s. The inclusion of two post-1945 essays by Kim Tongni and Son Chint’ae further serves to highlight the important connection between the colonial-period intellectual and literary history presented in the first ten essays of the volume and the beginnings of post-1945 South Korean cultural production. At the same time, essays by leftist thinkers and writers such as Sin Paegu, Paek Namun, Kang Kyŏngae and Kim Namch’ŏn will allow readers interested in North Korea to situate post-1945 developments in the northern half of the Korean Peninsula in relation to a history of leftist thought going back to the early 1920s. The works included in Imperatives of Culture, moreover, possess significance well beyond Korea’s borders. Essays by Ch’oe Namsŏn and Kang Kyŏngae concern themselves centrally with the metropole (Japan) and the periphery (Manchuria), while Kim Kirim’s and Kim Namch’ŏn’s works negotiate Western literary forms in complex ways. All of the essays in Imperatives of Culture, in fact, address, in different ways, a global modernity.
Imperatives of Culture provides the opportunity for non-Korean-speaking scholars engaged in transnational, interdisciplinary research on East Asia and the West to incorporate key Korean primary materials into their work. The volume also serves as an invaluable source of materials for a range of undergraduate syllabi, not only Korean history, civilization and literature courses, but also the increasingly important border-crossing courses on East Asian and Western modernity. In terms of the undergraduate curriculum, then, Imperatives of Culture is a most welcome complement to the seminal two-volume Sources of Korean Tradition (Peter Lee et al., ed., Columbia University Press, 1996, 2000).
The essays comprising Imperatives of Culture are extremely well chosen, presenting the richness and diversity of the colonial and early postcolonial Korean intellectual milieu. The translations are excellent, capturing the originals in every respect. Finally, the introductions to the volume itself and to each of the essays, all by Korean studies scholars engaged in cutting-edge work on the modern period, do an impeccable job of situating both the authors of the essays and the essays themselves in relation to a global intellectual and literary history. Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era makes a major contribution not only to Korean studies but, more broadly, to Asian studies and to our understanding of colonialism and modernity in the first half of the twentieth century.
Theodore Hughes
Columbia University, New York, USA
pp. 624-625