The Korean peninsula has been divided into two hostile camps for over a half century. Both North and South Koreans today lament this tragedy and dream of reunification. Yet even before the country's division in 1945 by Soviet and US occupation forces following World War II, the historical relationship between north and south was hardly one of national unity and harmony. In fact, as the articles in Sun Joo Kim's The Northern Region of Korea show, the northern provinces experienced marginalization and discrimination by the capital and the southern provinces throughout the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910), and the northern region, moreover, developed a distinctive cultural identity.
Kim's previous work, Marginality and Subversion in Korea: The Hong Kyŏngnae Rebellion of 1812 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), examines the first of the major uprisings in the nineteenth century and identifies its causes in local sources—the politics, society, and culture of the northwestern province of P'yŏngan—as opposed to conventional views that explain it in terms of national patterns of peasant unrest and socioeconomic upheaval. Kim continues the regional focus in this edited volume, challenging the “silence about the historical depth of regional identity in Korean history” (p. 3) in the nation-centered perspective of Korean historiography. Her introduction provides a historical survey of the northern region, from its beginnings as a fluid border and frontier area in pre-modern times to becoming a center of modernization in the early twentieth century.
The volume begins with a set of articles on the history and culture of the northern region during the Chosŏn. The first two deal with its role as a border area, a point of contact between Korean and non-Korean groups. Kenneth Robinson discusses Chosŏn policies toward Jurchen communities in the northeastern province of Hamgyŏng, and Kwon Naehyun examines the impact of the Chosŏn-Qing diplomatic and trade relations on P'yŏngan. The next two chapters concern images of the north. From the view of the capital and the southern provinces, the north was “uncivilized, militaristic, and barbaric” (p. 10). Jang Yoo-seung discusses how the northern literati defined themselves in the face of such stereotypes, and Jung Min explores eighteenth-century literary depictions of northerners, focusing on the discrimination that kept many talented northerners from meaningful careers in government service.
The two chapters that follow discuss the P'yŏngan dialect, of which the most distinctive feature is the lack of t-palatalization (e.g., the term for “train station,” chŏnggŏjang, is pronounced tŏnggŏdang). Paek Doo-hyeon explains that the P'yŏngan dialect is the result not only of linguistic factors but also of a self-conscious assertion of northern identity as the cradle of Korean civilization. Ross King looks at the controversies over spelling reform in the 1930s, in which P'yŏngan Protestants spearheaded the opposition against the standardization of han'gŭl orthography on similar grounds of their dialect representing the “correct” and “original” Korean language.
The next section explores the northern region's modern history, literature, and religion. Yumi Moon examines the influence of the changing East Asian political order in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on northern popular movements through case studies of Tonghak, Catholics, and miners. Bruce Fulton analyzes the works of Hwang Sunwŏn (1915–2000), one of the greatest modern Korean writers and P'yŏngan native son. In contrast to the prevailing view of Hwang as a socially and politically detached writer, Fulton exposes the subversive aspects of his corpus, especially in the stories set in P'yŏngan. Donald Clark paints a vivid portrait of the city of P'yŏngyang as the “Jerusalem of the East.” While relegated to the periphery under the old, Confucian-based Chosŏn order, P'yŏngyang became the center of Korean Christianity in the new, modern era.
The final two chapters take up again images of the north, this time in the modern period. German Kim and Ross King delve into Russian travel narratives from the 1860s to 1913 to describe how northern Korea and its inhabitants were viewed, ranging from physical depictions to Orientalist theories about the people's character. The concluding article by Mark Caprio traces the evolution of Japanese assimilationist discourse from relative indifference to the north to the declaration of an “era of northern Korea” in the late colonial period as the region became a strategic industrial cornerstone of Japan's expansionist policy on the continent.
As one of the first works in English-language scholarship to adopt a regional approach, The Northern Region of Korea sheds light on many aspects of Korean history and culture that have long been ignored. The articles are striking in their range of new and original research. And the work opens doors to further scholarship not only on northern Korea but also on other regions—for instance, Chŏlla in the southwest, which has been the subject of marginalization and discrimination in contemporary South Korea. The book represents a path-breaking addition to the field of Korean studies.
