This eagerly anticipated work is the fullest English-language treatment concerning regional identity and discrimination against northerners in Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). Readers may have first encountered the question of regional discrimination in Kim's excellent first book on the 1812 Hong Kyŏngnae rebellion.Footnote 11 As a fuller regional history of a “place on the political and cultural margin” (p. 143), Voice from the North is a mature book written by a scholar in her prime, reflecting a familiarity with the Chosŏn north that has appreciably deepened over a decade of research and numerous publications.
The professed aim of this latest ambitious study is to examine the “northern region of Chosŏn Korea, P'yŏngan Province in particular, from a regional perspective and through one man's [Yi Sihang's] life” (p. 3). The book offers four succinct main chapters, of which three are focused readings of Yi's career and life. The fourth chapter describes the commemoration of Kim Kyŏngsŏ, a northern exemplar enshrined in 1791, as well as Yi Sihang and other P'yŏngan yangban literati's supporting memory work.
The author argues that due to “institutional prejudice against his place of origin, Sihang's official career never became illustrious” (p. 89). Although he passed the munkwa civil service exam in 1699, Sihang was the victim of a “discriminatory discourse” (p. 146) that characterized the north as a place of “cultural backwardness” and “low scholarship” (p. 103). Kim suggests that Yi Sihang's story was not unique, and was shared by many northerners in the Chosŏn period.
In the twenty-first century, the idea that people from the northern half of the Korean peninsula might experience discrimination on the basis of origin may not seem audacious; however, this is certainly not the case in the study of Chosŏn Korea. In an attempt to refute possible concerns over retrojecting contemporary discrimination, Kim points out fairly that a dominant historiographical focus on the capital, the central government, and court voices has given rise to monolithic histories that assume a congruence of local and central perspectives (pp. 1–14). As Donald L. Baker suggests in a note on the book's cover, this book therefore constitutes a “powerful challenge” to Chosŏn historians to “rethink the relationship between the center and the periphery” and to unseat hegemonic dynastic narratives.
Methodologically, the rooting of a study of a broad social phenomenon—here, discrimination against a group of people on identity grounds—in the biographical explication of an individual's life is daring. In her innovative melding of social and cultural history approaches, Kim sets the burden of proof and argumentation quite high, as it can be quite challenging to show how “institutional prejudice,” rather than exigencies of talent or asset allocation, shaped the course of a person's life. Exhibiting the difficulties suffered by a marginal person is only the first correlative step in such an analysis; furthermore, Yi Sihang's exceptionalism probably complicates the author's attempts to demonstrate the necessary causation between his “Northernness” and inequitable social status. Having passed the civil service exam, he belonged to a privileged Chosŏn stratum composed of about 14,600 successful candidates over five centuries. But even though he was a P'yŏngyang elite who counted provincial governors among his friends, Kim points out that his celebrated literary talents were not sufficiently rewarded politically. One cannot help but wonder, however, if the limited recognition of his brilliance is notable given an eleven-year delay to his career that was due to a cheating scandal that unfairly ensnared the 1699 munkwa passers whose results were unilaterally nullified (and reinstated eleven years later) (p. 67). Although more famous Southern and Northern contemporaries praised his writing, he never assumed the highest offices. But as Kim points out, many officials from Kyŏngsang and Chŏlla provinces did not either, and so, her analysis invites future comparative scholarship (p. 75). To quote Linda Colley, “identities are not like hats. Human beings can and do put on several at a time”—and to read Yi Sihang's life as representative of a Northern marginality perhaps demands that the researcher tease out his relative disenfranchisement.Footnote 12 Ultimately, the book's success rests on the painstakingly researched and persuasive details of Yi Sihang's travails, and in particular, Kim's sophisticated extension of O Such'ang's Korean-language research on regionalism.
If “Northernness” was a Chosŏn identity against which substantive discrimination was marshaled, then questions arise: What is the North? And what is it north of? Henri Lefebvre has argued that space is socially produced, and so the “North” as a direction or region has meaning as a signifier that gestures not just to “northerners,” but also to the non-northerners.Footnote 13 Hence, an anti-Northern critique on the basis of origin is also an act of self-definition for the center. This is what Kim refers to as “Othering,” which entails the production of ideology or knowledge in the service of power.Footnote 14 Given that discourse is an engine of Othering, the lack of discursive examples where Chosŏn yangban articulated their identity as northerners seemed perplexing to this reader. The glossary offers the term “Pugin” as “northerners,” but Chosŏn northerners often did not refer to themselves as such—O Such'ang, the Korean scholar generously cited in this work, notes that common terms were “north-westerner” (sŏbugin) or even “westerner” (sŏin).Footnote 15 This point perhaps merely highlights a gap between Kim's and O Such'ang's conceptualization of northern identity, with the former dexterously deploying it primarily as a category of analysis while O unevenly recognizes “Northernness” as a category of lived experience. Kim's resistance to excavating the various northern subjectivities of P'yŏngan, Hwanghae, and Hamgyŏng provinces—three very different places, socioeconomically—suggests a more theoretically adventurous intellectual commitment to northern identity as a subjectivity that was sometimes unconsciously internalized and reproduced. A more forthright exposition of the making of northern identity could have better distinguished O Such'ang's and Kim's visions of Northernness, and also helped readers unfamiliar with the politics of identity grasp contradictions, such as the growth in the number of successful P'yŏngan examination candidates from the mid-seventeenth century against their “limited bureaucratic success due to regional discrimination” (p. 53) that was the result of “a relentless and intricate screening process” (p. 76) for inferior regional background. James B. Palais has suggested that there were multiple social metrics used in the evaluation of pedigree, and so the deterministic capacity of “Northernness” to limit a Chosŏn person's aspirations is perhaps difficult to ascertain.Footnote 16
This book successfully invites scholars to take up the gauntlet of regional history in Chosŏn studies, and to replicate Kim's approach in the study of the Chosŏn periphery. Further work in this emerging subfield may involve tracing a genealogy of Northernness within a multi-regional spectrum. This reviewer also finds the author's intervention in factional historiography to be intriguing, and commends her for going against decades of research that framed factional membership as powerfully deterministic—essentially, reading one's social circle as causative, not reflective, of one's political views. Instead, she seems to offer a more sophisticated appreciation of the interpellation of subject positions in Chosŏn politics. The author's engagement with cultural history methods and her championing of history-from-below is admirable. If in the wake of subaltern studies, concerns still existed about the validity of micro-historical and biographical approaches, Kim has surely put those doubts to rest. Overall, this book represents an important contribution to the field and is an attractive text for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses on Chosŏn Korea.
