Woohoo! I made the news. Or rather I should say that Vladimir Tikhonov and I have made the news with our new translation of the writings of Han Yongun. Available in all good bookshops etc etc.
Not sure about the accuracy of this bit though:
이번 번역은 박노자 오슬로 국립대학 한국학 교수와 영국 런던대 산하 동양ㆍ아프리카학대학(SOAS)에서 박사과정 중인 오웬 밀러씨의 공동 작업으로 진행됐다.
:(
By complete chance I just came across this brand spanking new book in the library. It looks like seriously hot stuff.[*]
It would be worth grabbing from the nearest library for the translation of Jeong Seong-jin’s ‘Trend of Marxian Ratios in Korea, 1970-2003′ alone, but many of the other articles look fascinating too, especially (for me at least) the historical section, which contains, ‘Land Reform and Capitalist Development in Korea’ by Jang Sang-hwan and ‘A Critical Reappraisal of the Park Chung Hee System’ by Kim Soohaeng and Park Seung-ho.
What we need now is a similar work on the history of capitalist development in North Korea - there’s some good work out there in Korean. I’d love to translate some of that stuff (and some more of Jeong Seongjin’s articles), but that will probably remain in my mental ‘one day’ category for the foreseeable future.
[*]For those who like hardcore Marxist economics replete with tables, charts and unfathomable equations.
K-Punk turns an analysis of England’s defeat on Saturday into an attack on empiricism. Excellent.
Crossposted from Frog in a Well.
I thought I would revive this title once more and add another post to the series on recent historiographical clashes in South Korea since I recently came across another interesting example that actually fits rather nicely with some of the posts made here by Jiyul and Noja.
I came across this report on a debate on the Park Chung-hee era between Im Chi-hyŏn and Cho Hŭi-yŏn in the pages of the Donga Ilbo newspaper. Apparently the debate between the two has been going on since 2004, particularly in the pages of the journal Historical Criticism (역사비평) and the Professors’ Newspaper (교수신문).
Basically, the main protagonist, Im Chi-hyŏn, argues that Park’s rule was an example of a ‘mass dictatorship’ (대중독재), in other words, the idea that Park was able to rule by creating some degree of consent for his dictatorship. Cho counters that “the mass dictatorship theory is problemmatic because it expands the accommodating silence of the masses into a general and active agreement with the dictatorship, thus justifying it.”
Im on the other hand responds that “Cho’s understanding makes the people into heroes and demonises the dictator, creating a moralistic duality. If we are to prevent a new dictatorship from arising we need to go beyond moralistic dualism and provide a dispassionate analysis.”
Going a bit further, Cho argues that both Im Chi-hyŏn’s views and those of Yi Yŏng-hun (who edited two recent books I’ve mentioned here: 해방 전후사의 재인식 and 수량경제사로 다시 본 조선후기) are part of a general attempt to create a revisionist history that takes advantage of the current crisis of ‘democratic progressive discourse’. He argues that while Yi’s critique comes from the viewpoint of the so-called ‘New Right’, Im’s comes from a postmodernist (탈근대적) position. Funnily enough I’m planning to translate a review of 해방 전후사의 재인식 by a Korean Marxist historian whom I rate highly, who makes almost exactly the same point, titling his review: ‘A reactionary duet between the right and the postmodernists.’ When I actually have some time to do the translation I’ll be sure to make it available to readers here.
More on the debate here at the Chosun Ilbo. And something in English I found here on Im’s theory of mass dictatorship.
Time to plug an article of mine that came out last week in International Socialism 109 on the early history of North Korea and what it means for our understanding of the country today. It’s basically an introduction to/review of the work of Kim Ha-yông, and in particular her book The Korean Peninsula from an Internationalist Perspective (국제주의 시각에서 본 한반도). At some stage it would be nice to translate the whole of this book, but that will have to wait until I have time.
Regular readers of this blog (if there are any) will have noticed that I have referenced or quoted from Kim Ha-yông’s work before. If you read the article you might also notice that I have made quite a bit of use of two excellent books on the early history of North Korea: Charles Armstrong’s The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (2003) and Andrei Lankov’s From Stalin to Kim Il-sung (2001). Both are highly recommended as works of history, although I think their analysis is lacking in comparison to Kim Ha-yông’s.
They haven’t put the article up at the ISJ site yet for some reason, but I’ll link it when they do. In the meantime here are a few sample paragraphs (from the middle):
After liberation, factories and other industrial facilities formerly owned by the Japanese remained under the effective control of the Soviet administration until late July 1946, when the Korean-run government (now called the North Korea Provisional People’s Committee) took them over and soon after announced their nationalisation. Further nationalisation happened rapidly, and by 1949 state-run industry accounted for 90.7 percent of total industrial production. The nationalization of industry and the commencement of a series of one-year plans in the late 1940s are one of the main developments that have led historians and commentators, whether hostile or friendly to the regime, to call North Korea socialist from this time on. In opposition to this view, Kim Ha-yong puts North Korea’s state ownership of industry into the context of the worldwide trend towards state capitalism, particularly in the period after the Second World War:
It was very common, particularly in developing countries, for the state to take a direct role in planning and overseeing resources and means of production in order to achieve rapid industrial growth. Representative examples include China, Cuba and African countries such as Mozambique, but South Korea’s economic development strategy under Park Chung-hee cannot be excluded either. In the period immediately after liberation, even right wing parties such as the Korean Democratic Party (Hanmindang) insisted that the main industries needed to be nationalised in order to overcome the society’s backwardness. From this point of view, North Korea’s nationalisation programme of 1946, far from being a break away from capitalism, was only an extreme manifestation of the trend towards the statisation of capital that continued from the 1930s through to the 1960s.
You can even subscribe if you’re desperate to read the rest…
Besides his specific defence of Marx against Said’s accusations, Habib also attacks the way in which,
‘Orientalism’ as a word has thus been so degraded that anyone can use it for anything one disapproves of, even when the disapprover may himself be a dyed in the wool ‘Orientalist’!
The meat of Habib’s criticism is also absolutely to the point:
The essential weakness of Edward Said and those who follow him and speak of ‘Orientalism’ and ‘colonial discourse’ in the same breath lies in the failure to see that colonialism (including imperialism, neocolonialism, etc) does not form the only major influence over Oriental scholarship in the west or in the Orient. There is too easy a readiness on their part to assume that such ideas as those of gender and racial equality, and of nation and democracy, that arose in the West in modern times, and obtained popular acceptance through upheavals like the French Revolution of 1789 and the Soviet Revolution of 1917, have exercised no influence at all on modern studies of Oriental societies. Yet who can read Wellhausen’s Arab Kingdom and its Fall without being convinced that his analysis of the Umayyid Caliphate, as structured on distinct classes based on political and economic dominance and subjugation, is derived from ideas that social democracy had introduced in the Germany of his time. In India D D Kosambi, drawing quite firmly on the Orientalist tradition of scholarship, aimed at reconstructing ancient Indian history through the application of Marxist concepts. Modern democratic, as against colonial, notions have thus created an increasing belief that Oriental societies, like all human societies, are susceptible to the same methods of study—indeed, with the same essential assumptions—as the history of western societies. There has accordingly developed within Oriental learning almost parallel, but ultimately conflicting, trends based respectively on colonial and what may be called universalist approaches.
So, the basic problem with Said’s critique of Orientalism seems to be that, like quite a bit of other post-colonial scholarship, it often produces a mirror-image of colonial discourse and thereby paradoxically ends up validating it to some extent. Towards the end of his article Habib strikes a rather optimistic note, arguing that our expanding knowledge of the human past inevitably leads to a better (more universalist) understanding of human history and the overturning of previous mistaken ideas.
However, he also notes that it has been relatively easy for those who actually provide support for ‘neo-colonialism’ to co-opt scholarship heavily based on Said’s critique of Orientalism. Habib uses as an example the work of the Indian Subaltern group, but another example of such potentially co-optable scholarship might be recent attempts to ‘overcome’ nationalism and nationalist historiography in Korea. The complaint that most Korean historiography is tainted by nationalism or is overly Eurocentric because it attempts to apply Marxist or other theories of European/North American origin to an East Asian society has long been a common one among many of the more conservative US scholars writing on Korean history. The charge of ‘irrational nationalism’ (the echoes of good old-fashioned Orientalism are very strong in this phrase) has also, ironically, been one of the favourite accusations levelled by the Japanese neo-nationalists against Koreans protesting Japan’s revisionist history textbooks.
I’m not making an argument for either nationalist or Orientalist scholarship here, just agreeing with Habib that there can be a tendency to throw out the baby with the bath water and disregard all previous historical scholarship as either Orientalist (written by Western scholars) or nationalist (written by ‘native’ postcolonial scholars). This in turn can form part of a discourse that repudiates past (or perhaps present) anti-colonial struggles themselves as overly nationalist or ‘totalizing’. Thus, the critique of Orientalism and Eurocentrism can turn away from the work of striving for a universalist understanding of human history and come perilously close to Orientalism itself.
It could be argued that the late Edward Said and his critique of Orientalism have become sacred cows in their own right. It seems that many of the fundamental insights of Said’s classic book, Orientalism, are valid and have rightly reached the level of orthodoxy in many universities (I sometimes wonder whether SOAS should alter its name to read the School of Orientalism and African Studies). But it’s not difficult to feel uneasy about the slack and sometimes less than discriminating application of the term. This concern is expressed very clearly in a sharp article by the Indian historian Irfan Habib that was originally published earlier this year in the journal Social Scientist and has been republished in the latest issue of International Socialism Journal.
Habib’s basic criticism of Said is that he applies the accusation of ‘Orientalist’ to far too broad a spectrum of scholars working on Asia and Africa, arguing that anything written in the ‘West’ is inherently Orientalist, Eurocentric and racist, ignoring the fact that there has been much good scholarship by Western historians that cannot be accused of any of these vices (Habib brings up the examples of Joseph Needham and Ignaz Goldziher). In the process Said himself, Habib argues, uses some rather dubious and unfounded arguments, based on highly selective and misleading quotation. Habib particularly takes him to task for his treatment of Marx – a treatment that has helped to turn the Marx = Eurocentrist equation into a modern day commonplace:
Marx as a subject of Said’s study… offers further examples of the cavalier way in which Said can stuff anyone he dislikes or wishes to belittle into his nasty basket of ‘Orientalists’. Much has already been said on this matter by Aijaz Ahmad in his essay, ‘Marx on India: a Clarification’ (In Theory, Delhi, 1994, pp221-242). He shows that Said builds his interpretation on just two passages taken from Marx’s two articles published in the New York Tribune in 1853, and seems to be unacquainted with what Marx wrote elsewhere on India. Here it must be added that while Marx necessarily relied on (the quite extensive) European reports on India, the picture that he drew out of it, of the social and economic devastation that British rule caused in India, was largely his own—and this was hardly an ‘Orientalist’ enterprise under Said’s definition. Moreover even in Marx’s second essay, apparently consulted by Said, there is a passage looking forward to the Indians overthrowing ‘the English yoke’ (K Marx and F Engels, Collected Works, vol 12, Moscow, 1979, p221). Marx also writes in the very same article of ‘the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation [which] lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies where it goes naked.’ And yet, again and again in his book, Said sneers at Marx as being, at the end of the day, a pro-colonial ‘Orientalist’. So we are told, ‘This Orientalism can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx’ (p3). The view that ‘Indians were civilisationally, if not racially, inferior’ is indirectly ascribed to Marx on page 14. On page 102 Said goes so far as to put Marx among those writers who could use all the following ‘generalities unquestioningly’: ‘An Oriental lives in the Orient, he lives a life of Oriental ease, in a state of Oriental despotism, and sensuality, imbued with a feeling of Oriental fatalism.’ The italicised words constitute a fantastic misrepresentation of Karl Marx’s writings on Asia. But Said does not still stop here. On p231 he puts Marx among those who held that ‘an Oriental man was first an Oriental and only second a man’—a meaningless formula seemingly coined simply to belittle Marx.
While the first two sections are purely philosophical, the next two enter into the realms of religion and mythology. The style matches the content. Instead of sharp, clear, and concise definitions, we find the habitual indulgence in “historical” quotations from the classics. It was customary in the tracts of the time to prove everything by biblical sayings. The Buddhists themselves were fond of relying on biblical authority as a heavy defense weapon against their Confucian opponents. Section 3 (questions 25-27) treats of the like quality of spiritual power in the holy sages of antiquity, the argument being conducted in somewhat unconvincing metaphors. Finally, in the fourth section (questions 28-30), Fan Chen attempts to come to grips with the problem of the relation between human and supernatural beings, a problem that arises from the double meaning of shen: “soul” or “spirit,” and “spirits” in the sense of supernatural beings. But he gives confused and evasive answers to the opponent’s questions, the opponent having meanwhile been converted to the belief in the mortality of the soul. On the one hand Fan argues that the ancestral cult has a merely educative value – a point of view that comes very close to Confucianism in its original form – and uses the same arguments as Wang Ch’ung against ghost stories about evil spirits, while on the other he acknowledges the existence of dark spirits and only denies the possibility of men changing into spirits. This is the contradiction – whether conscious or unconscious is an open question – upon which Fan’s materialism founders.
The last section is no longer a discussion. The opening question on the application of the mortality theory is merely a prelude to the great peroration on the harmfulness of Buddhism. Fan Chen here expounds his own beliefs, which combine Taoist naturalism and Confucian social views. He states his preference for the well-being and happiness of the human family on earth over salvation in the next world. To be contented with one’s lot and resigned to one’s fate are what maintain the upper and lower parts of society in a permanent state of balance
Source: Etienne Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy, (Yale university Press, 1964) pp262-3.
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