[Paik Nak-chung] Coloniality in Korea and a South Korean project for overcoming modernity
1. Coloniality and Eurocentrism in East Asia
I use the term ‘coloniality' broadly to indicate power relations most clearly exemplified by yet not limited to actual colonialism. Its characteristic features then would include not merely nor even necessarily juridical inequality as in formally colonial situations but other forms of domination and exclusion such as racism/ethnicism, authoritarianism, sexism, and Eurocentric structure of knowledge, which in turn would situate coloniality as very much a part of the modern world-system. [1] On this understanding the word ‘postcoloniality' would lose its basic, descriptive sense (of the period or condition postdating formal colonial rule), retaining only its judgmental meaning (of overcoming or trying to overcome coloniality in the more pervasive form). My own instinct is to minimize the use of this word so as to avoid unnecessary confusion.
‘Eurocentric', of course, is a cultural rather than cartographical term. Americanism, or the ideology proclaiming the superiority of the ‘American (i.e., U. S.) way of life' over all others including the European, would thus constitute a culmination of Eurocentrism rather than its denial. Eurocentrism also means much more than an explicit upholding of European-North American values. It plays a crucial role in coloniality precisely because it works at such profound depths, indeed at the level even of defining ‘the truth', of determining what is knowledge and what is not (Wallerstein 1997a).
Coloniality in Korea, too, involves Eurocentrism in both its more obvious and profounder forms. But before going on to address the topic, a few remarks regarding East Asia as a whole are in order.
East Asia was the last major region of the globe to be incorporated into the capitalist world-economy. Also, it was never fully colonized by Western powers ― except for Vietnam, which culturally may count as part of East Asia but geographically (and in other important respects) belongs to Southeast Asia. Of the three main East Asian states, then, Japan not only was never colonized but itself became a colonizing power. China's ‘semi-colonial' status may be said to begin with the Opium War of 1840 and to last till 1945 if not 1949, but it never became a full colony; while Korea, though indeed suffering direct colonial rule from 1910 to 1945, was occupied by Japan, a fellow East Asian nation.
These rudimentary facts remind us that coloniality in East Asia ― even in Korea with its colonial past ― would exhibit a different aspect from what one would find in Latin America, Africa, or some other parts of Asia. They may also serve to conceal the fact that coloniality with all its accompanying features of Eurocentrism, racism/ethnicism, lack of democratic rights, etc., has been and still is not the less real in East Asia.
Japan's success in emulating Western industrial (and colonial) powers did pose a challenge to the simpler variants of Eurocentrism, but in a deeper sense it reinforced the ‘universality' of the reigning world-system and its ideologies. Even its war with the United States and Britain, carried out in the name of ‘East Asian co-prosperity' and resistance against the white man's domination, represented a culmination in its assiduous discipleship to Western imperialism and racism/ethnicism.
China with its deep-rooted traditions of Sinocentrism would seem unusually qualified to offer resistance to Eurocentrism and coloniality. It has indeed presented numerous instances of resistance, and may yet present more. In the light, however, of China's current drive for modernization and development ― ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics' is the official slogan of its Communist leadership ― even Mao Zedong's titanic anti-systemic endeavors seem to reveal features of yet another developmentalism, not to mention the more recent phase, for which ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics' may be a more accurate description. This is not to say that we have had the last word on Mao and Maoism, nor even on the current phase, for China's revolutionary legacy alone presents challenges enough to any simple pursuit of modernity (Liu 1998).
Korea's colonization by Japan, too, produced superficially less Westernized and at times even anti-Western features but actually ended up inculcating mostly Eurocentric values. For one thing, Japan's anti-Western rhetoric often worked to make Koreans more receptive to the West and oblivious of the complicity of Britain and the United States in the early days of Japan's colonizing venture. But more importantly, because the capitalist world-system imposed its colonial rule through an Asian surrogate rather than through direct rule by a Western state, its Eurocentrism worked the more insiduously and in some sense the more effectively. I will give one example from everyday living. Western-style clothing promoted by the Japanese has taken root and become almost universal among Koreans (especially among the male sex.) There are of course other factors as well, but if the Japanese had imposed their own attire, Koreans would have felt a much stronger urge to revert to traditional Korean costume at the time of Liberation. The fact is, the Japanese were model students of the West in matters far beyond economic development and nation-state building: since the Meiji days, for instance, the official cuisine (at state banquets) of the Japanese Imperial Palace has been French, even as the ceremonial attire for the Emperor and his ministers on these occasions has been tuxedos and frock coats.
Nor did coloniality in East Asia fail to show the familiar face of racism/ethnicism - this in a region where virtually a single race (in the broad sense of the term) existed and no strong sense of ethnic identity was to be found throughout the Chinese ecumene, (although Koreans with their long experience of relatively centralized rule, the overwhelming presence of neighboring China, and exposure to frequent invasions by the Chinese, Mongols, Manchus and Japanese, did constitute something of an exception). At any rate, the virulence of Imperial Japan's racist nationalism, which made possible its many atrocities in Korea and against foreign prisoners of war, and the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in Nanjing in 1937, might bespeak an exceptional barbarity as compared to the conduct of European powers toward their neighboring countries. Indeed, many in East Asia (including Korea, of course) are in the habit of finding in such behavior a ‘national trait' of the Japanese. However, not only is this a highly problematical notion in itself, we find little empirical evidence throughout the previous centuries of the Japanese looking down on Koreans or Chinese as virtually subhuman beings. Only with modern Japan's decision to ‘exit from Asia and enter Europe' (datsua nyuo) and its pride in having succeeded in the venture do the rest of Asian population begin to be set up as the Other. Japan's atrocities thus make more sense in the light of what Eurocentrism effected in Europe's early encounter with the indigenous populations of the Americas or Africa. In fact, they fit the general pattern better than the more thoroughly organized and technologically awesome modern variant represented by the Nazi extermination of the Jews (Maier 1988, 1997) [2] ― or for that matter, by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
2. Korea since 1945 and the ‘division system'
Insofar as the modern world-system now holds sway in East Asia as in the rest of the globe, coloniality as the ‘underside of modernity' (Dussel 1996) must be discernible throughout this region ― even in Japan which meanwhile has become a full-fledged core nation. But I would like to concentrate on Korea where features of coloniality are more visible though not the less complex.
Korea was liberated from Japanese rule in August 1945 but divided along the 38th Parallel by the Soviet and U.S. occupation troops. The division soon became consolidated by the establishment of separate regimes (1948), and after a devastating war (1950-53), has developed into what I have called the ‘division system' encompassing the entire peninsula, with the vested interests of the two Koreas in collusion as well as hostile confrontation, a sui generis subsystem of the world-system with considerable powers of self-reproduction (Paik 1993, 1996, 1998)
Coloniality or colonialism was always a salient feature in the rhetoric of confrontation between the two opposing regimes. North Korea in particular has pointed to the presence of U. S. troops in South Korea, as well as of numerous former collaborators with Japan in Southern ruling circles, as evidence of its having never terminated its colonial status and being now a colony of the United States. The South Korean government in its turn, with less tangible corroboration, would accuse its counterpart of being a ‘puppet' ― of the Soviet Union or of China, as the case might be. The coloniality of the divided peninsula, however, cannot be defined in these terms. The U. S. domination of South Korea, neocolonial rather than strictly colonial to begin with, today falls far short of the control over a banana republic, while North Korea with its insistence on chuch'e or self-reliance has shown itself exemplary at least in resisting direct interference by a foreign power in its domestic affairs.
The concept of the division system puts the question of coloniality in an entirely different light. It reveals a reality that imposes inherent limits (though with noticeable and shifting differences in the particulars) on the ability of either of its two component parts to achieve democracy and real independence from foreign manipulations. Significant gains in South Korea's democratization process or the strongly (at times truculently) independent foreign policy stance of North Korea may appear to belie this judgment. But regarding the former we must note that movements for democracy have largely overlapped with those for reunification and achieved their most memorable recent success, the coming to power through the electoral process of the opposition parties and the long-time dissident leader Kim Dae-Jung, only at a time when the division system has entered a period of crisis. And if a state's degree of self-reliance be judged in terms of its real power to protect and promote its interest in the global arena rather than in the narrow sense of resisting outright interference in its internal affairs, North Korea today must be rated as an even less of an autonomous state than its southern counterpart.
Insofar as each Korean state does not directly participate in the interstate system like most states but through the mediation of the division system, it is destined to remain less than a full nation-state ― a fact epitomized by its not having an internationally recognized (nor intra-nationally legitimated) border facing its chief antagonist. This lack of a ‘normal' state also creates among most Koreans a fixation on a unitary nation-state, which in its turn helps to maintain, rather than overcome, the state of division and confrontation, for the prospect of a tight unitary state heightens anxiety over any reunification other than on one's own terms.
The division system even reproduces the racism/ethnicism of coloniality, and that within the same ethnos and among the very Koreans who so often boast of their ‘homogeneity'. Members of the other side in the confrontation become not mere adversaries or even enemies but virtually subhuman. This again has its impact on domestic politics, where lack of a secure border already provides stronger than usual grounds for a national security state, as internal dissidence now turns into an unnatural allegiance to the Other rather than simple dissidence for better or worse. As a matter of fact, Korea's division began its course of consolidation with the very sort of inhuman barbarity for which Koreans are wont to blame the Japanese ― with the decimation of the population of Cheju Island in the ‘April 3 Incident' of 1948. Nor has the record of South Korean troops in the Vietnam War, for instance, been qualitatively different from the conduct of the Imperial Japanese Army. For all its touted instability and potential explosiveness, the division system of the Korean peninsula thus serves as a faithful component of the modern world system, not only by legitimizing the continuing hegemonic role of the United States but by reproducing coloniality in still another form and so reinforcing the ideologies of statism, nationalism, developmentalism and racism as well as sexism. [3]
Overcoming the division system therefore signifies more than just any reunification whatsoever. A unilateral conquest or absorption, even were it possible, would hardly qualify as a genuine overcoming, since it would leave intact or even reinforced the vested interests of at least one side and certainly entail no damage to the reigning powers of the world-system. Only a reunification process with substantial popular input, resulting in an innovative state structure and a good deal besides, would ensure a different result.
The task is daunting enough, and its plausibility must of course be examined on its merits. This is not the place for such an examination, but claims of self-styled realists for the ‘inevitability' of a German-type unification by absorption of the north seem to betray a singular lack of realism, in their rather cavalier estimate of the arguably higher probability of war as North Korean leadership's alternative option and of the almost certain bankruptcy of South Korean economy if it had to undertake a burden probably heavier than that represented by East Germany, with financial resources incomparably smaller than West Germany's. True, that leaves another favorite option of the ‘realists': maintaining division in a less volatile and explosive condition. This certainly is a more realistic course in the short run, but there are conjunctural factors ― among others the end of the Cold War and the extreme volatility of the northern half of the division system, plus volatility in the south due to progress in democratization ― that make the maintenance of the division system increasingly difficult and even dangerous. Not to mention the larger structural crisis of the world-system that is creating instability and chaos throughout the globe (Wallerstein 1998b).
But resistance to the very notion of division system even among the more politically committed of South Korean social scientists (Paik 1994), though often cloaked in the shape of scientific skepticism regarding the plausibility of its overcoming, must be attributed to something deeper: precisely those Eurocentric assumptions of social science such as the insistence on the nation-state as a unit of analysis (even when as in Korea no unified state is to be found) or the conception of social system as a self-enclosed ‘structure' waiting to be acted on through some ‘agency'. As a result, advocacy of the notion of division system has often been charged with ‘indulgence in the literary imagination'. Perhaps one may approach the question through a detour of what has been happening to the literary imagination in South Korea over the past few decades.
3. Modernity and South Korea's ‘national literature movement'
On a personal note, as a literary critic, editor, and university teacher of English literature I have been primarily engaged in what in South Korea has been known as the ‘national literature movement', which over the years has been an important part of the larger democratization movement. The discourse of national literature emerged ― or rather re-emerged (after many of the leftist participants in a similar debate in the post-Liberation days had been silenced or had moved to north during the Korean War) ― in the early 1970s, [4] then acquired an organizational focus and activist momentum with the launching in 1974 of the Council of Writers for the Practice of Freedom (chayu silch'on munin hyobuihoe), which after the nationwide protest movements against military dictatorship in June 1987 was expanded and reorganized as the Association of Writers for National Literature (minjok munhak chakka hoeui). But this is not the place to offer even a brief exposition of the purport or history of this literary movement (Paik 1993, 1996). The present paper aims primarily to deal with it in the light of ‘coloniality in Korea and a South Korean project for overcoming modernity'.
The very use of two different appellations, Korea and South Korea, in the title of this paper should serve as a reminder that national identity for a contemporary Korean is at the very least double, namely, as a member of the Korean nation (encompassing north and south) and a citizen of either of the divided states; [5] and that a ‘national literature' that proposes to address the reality of this division is not likely to adopt a simply nationalistic agenda. As a matter of fact, the movement not only has produced a rich corpus of work by distinguished poets like Ko Un, Shin Kyongnim and Kim Chi-ha and novelists like Hwang Suk-young, Yi Mun-gu, Pak Wan-so and Hyun Ki-young (to mention only the more established reputations in their fifties and sixties) but a range of often sophisticated theoretical debate including some radical questioning of nationalism (Paik 1990).
The phrase ‘overcoming modernity', too, involves some simplification, representing a sort of shorthand for what among some of us in Korea has been termed ‘the double project of simultaneously adapting to and overcoming modernity'. The omitted portion is crucial. For without really learning to cope with the modernity that has become an inescapable fact of life, ‘overcoming modernity' would remain empty talk at best, and could even degenerate to rather pernicious talk justifying a variety of regressive politics and social action. Whether ‘the double project' itself makes sense, and how, remains to be addressed.
Not the least difficulty presents itself in defining what one means by ‘adapting to' or ‘coping with' modernity. Insofar as the modern world-system decrees misery and even extinction to any sizable group (and indeed most individuals) that fail to respect its logic of endless accumulation of capital and the attendant competition, a minimum adaptation and competitiveness would be required in any event ― though whether you can choose to stop at the ‘minimum' once you have begun remains a nagging question. Yet modernity, particularly in Europe and North America, is also widely acknowledged (except by its harshest critics) to have accomplished many things worth emulating for their own sake; hence adaptation would imply more than coping for the sake of sheer survival.
Two different paradigms of modernity, “the Eurocentric and the planetary” as Dussel puts it (Dussel 1998: 3-4), [6] seem here to operate, causing some confusion. We may clarify the matter by saying that opting for the second, ‘planetary' sense still requires adaptation and coping if only as a precondition for overcoming the modern world-system; and further, that such coping would entail actively emulating many of the valuable experiences and achievements in the “culture of the center of the ‘world-system'.” Still, emulation to this purpose should better qualify as an essential component of Dussel's project of ‘transmodernity' than as joining Habermas' ‘incomplete project' of modernity (Dussel 1998; Habermas 1983).
Speaking for myself, it is far from the case that I started out with anything like intellectual clarity on this issue. Yet the complex attitude toward modernity was forced upon us by the very nature of the project of ‘national literature'. For on one hand, this project was informed by the aspiration to emulate the great flowering of vernacular literatures among European nations in the early days of modernity, but even more crucial was the knowledge that no such flowering could be achieved through a process of duplication or ‘catching up', only by being true to the particular reality of the divided nation with a colonial past and thus addressing an aspect of modernity hitherto neglected by world literature. Perhaps any genuine artistic and literary endeavor entails the ‘double project' of at once learning to live with and trying to overcome the given reality, but on the modern artist it is enjoined with all the greater force both by the overwhelming pressures of the modern world-system and the enormity of its contradictions.
Consequently, the attitude toward the canonical works of Western literature and other cultural productions of the ‘center' of the modern world-system cannot be simply iconoclastic. For a non-Eurocentric reading should not operate with any less respect than the Eurocentric for the essential openness of any genuine literature to the ‘double project'. Nor can we postulate a South Korean or Third World reading that inherently differs from a Western or First World one, which would mean falling into the very trap of Orientalism (or Occidentalism as an Orientalism in reverse.) As already pointed out, Eurocentrism rears its head ― indeed its hydra head, as Wallerstein remarks (Wallerstein 1997: 94)--both in East and West, and if Korean readers mobilize their local/national concerns in their reading of Western literature, their aim certainly cannot be to remain parochial by rejecting all readings by Westerners but precisely to criticize the parochiality of Eurocentric readings of whatever description, including some of the ‘postcolonial' or ‘deconstructive' readings that too easily dismiss the great potential for resistance and solidarity found in the canonical works. Critical rereadings along this line have thus formed an important part of our ‘national literature' project, and a survey of the contemporary global scene even prompts the conviction that the very life of those works and the preservation of literature itself may now depend on the simultaneous flowering of a great many national and regional literatures in the peripheral areas of the world (Paik 1998).
The understanding of the national question in terms of the ‘division system' ― that is, in terms of the world-system and its peculiar local operations in and around the Korean peninsula ― may be said to represent a logical extension of this literary project. Preoccupation with reunification as a national yet non-nationalistic agenda achieves here a greater articulation, impelled in part by dissatisfaction with the discourse of ‘progressive' social science of either the national-liberationist or the Leninist-revolutionary variety. For the literary imagination at least has the virtue of trying to address real people in a divided country rather than theorizing from the premise of the ‘nation' as an entity or ‘South Korean capitalism' as a self-sufficient unit of analysis. And as a people-oriented discourse (in the sense that the vested interests of both sides are seen to oppose and oppress the ordinary people) and as a global perspective (in the sense that Korea's division is understood as a local operation of the world-system) writers' commitment to overcome the division system has managed more effectively than the ostensibly more scientific discourses to integrate the national agenda with global and local ones. For the aim (to reiterate) is not so much national reunification per se as the abolition of the division system as a crucial subset of the world-system, and so calls for effective interconnections between the immediate ‘reformist' struggles for fuller citizenship rights on each side of the dividing line, the middle-range task of reunification based on and further enlarging these rights, and the long-term endeavor to change the world-system and create a new civilization.
4. Some related questions and agendas
The kind of project outlined above almost automatically connects literary and artistic concerns with other areas of intellectual work, and raises a whole range of questions of global relevance. The final section of this paper will attempt to touch upon three of them.
One question demanding fuller debate involves the importance of having a national project, that is, importance not only to the nation concerned but as a general problem in the collective endeavor to create a more humane society. The injunction to ‘think globally and act locally' is sound enough in principle, but in practice faces the danger of too fragmented local actions on the one hand and ineffectual global thinking on the other. Availability of a national project as an intermediary term certainly would help to surmount that danger. It may even be indispensable.
Of course, the particular project that the division system of the Korean peninsula calls for is a special burden and privilege not everywhere available, but one must not stop trying even where opportunities are less obvious. And surely a mass movement cannot neglect the national dimension, including questions of national politics and state power. True, we should no longer harbor any illusion that ‘the right people' in power can and will transform the system, and part of the soundness of the slogan ‘think globally, act locally' consists in the fact that it “deliberately leaves out the state, and represents a withdrawal of faith in the state as a mechanism of reform” (Wallerstein et al. 1996: 82). But as the same Gulbenkian Report goes on to point out, “rejection of the state as the indicated sociographical container for social analysis in no way means that the state is no longer to be viewed as a key institution in the modern world, one that has profound influences on economic, cultural, and social processes” (1996: 85). Post-1968 antisystemic movements seem all too prone to give up on national politics, but our response should move beyond simple anti-statism to the creative innovation of more adequate state structures. This should be another instance of ‘adapting to modernity' if only to get serious about ‘overcoming modernity'.
Secondly, it is now widely recognized that the project of overcoming modernity involves surmounting the Eurocentric structure of knowledge with its particular conception of truth. This is a famous theme of many a ‘postmodernist' or ‘postcolonial' thinker, and forms a keystone of ‘world-systems analysis' as well. In the popular endeavors for Korea's reunification it has also surfaced as a practical question, the very notion of the division system impinging on a certain ‘unthinking' [7] of Eurocentric social science. The ‘innovative state structure and a good deal besides' that I posited above as a necessary condition of a genuine overcoming of the division system would thus include a radical rethinking on ― and reorientation toward ― truth as well as a new form of compound state specifically tailored to the evolving needs of the once divided people.
I must speak under correction in addressing so large and abstruse a subject, but it seems a common problem in most extant critiques of Eurocentric knowledge that either deconstruction of the dominant ‘truth' ends up virtually dispensing with truth as such, or advocacy of an alternative conception of truth remains little more than an abstract recognition of the need. Here a literary project with a non-European background may have something to contribute. For, on one hand, the search for a different kind of truth than the scientific has always been crucial in any serious artistic endeavor and, on the other hand, elements in East Asian thought could provide a new opening for this search.
At any rate it is clearly more appropriate to criticize the dominance of instrumental reason over “the historical promise of the liberation of humanity”(Quijano 1993: 145) that is implicit in European reason as well, than totally to reject reason (or even instrumental reason) as such. The goal has variously been expressed as “the unity of the tree of knowledge with the tree of life”(1993:150) or “pursuing the true and the good in tandem” (Wallerstein 1997a: 107). Wallerstein further stipulates that the true and the good “cannot be ‘fused' as concepts, but yes they can be pursued ‘in tandem'” (Wallerstein 1998a: 159).
But the problem remains that insofar as the true and the good are brought together only in practice rather than in essential conception, their combined pursuit must be reduced (or elevated) to a sort of tour de force . We need a bolder conception that acknowledges the competence of true art (and analogous workings of human creativity) to discover ― creatively discover ― a higher kind of truth and objectivity, while the truth of natural or social sciences would constitute a specialized and more limited application of that creativity. So far such boldness ― qualitatively different from the run-of-the-mill aestheticist valuation of art over truth ― only rarely finds utterance in the West, and that mainly among thinkers frequently (whether with justice or not) charged with Eurocentrism, such as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the English critic F. R. Leavis (Heidegger 1971; Leavis 1975). [8]
In this context it is worth recalling that the traditional East Asian notion of dao (or the Way), whether in Confucianism, Buddhism, or Daoism, has always represented as it were a ‘fusion' of the true and the good ― but then, ‘true' in a sense going beyond any propositional truth (and in Buddhism, beyond even any distinction between being and non-being, thus crucially placing that truth beyond the pale of essentialism) and, again especially in Buddhism, ‘good' not confined to the customary ethical dichotomy (and in that sense going, in Nietzsche's phrase, ‘beyond good and evil'.) Not that any simple return to or revival of traditional dao provides the answer. Such a return, even if possible, would be problematic because, whatever the essential thrust, particular conceptions of dao have always identified themselves with particular values sustaining generally authoritarian and unvaryingly inegalitarian social systems. Still, whether the true and the good can be pursued ‘in tandem' without a ‘fusion' at some such ultimate level once familiar to East Asian thought and practice ought to be pondered in any real critique of modern rationality.
Finally, the question of equality itself needs to be thought through in light of another possible East Asian contribution, one closely related to the notion of dao and the implied degrees in the enlightenment to and pursuit of ‘the Way'. This is at once a theoretical question and one of social organization in the project of liberation. The widespread postmodernist, postcolonial and/or feminist notion of ‘difference' rarely seems to register in the discourse on social equality, all the less so when it is a question of difference in the most vital knowledge of the true and the good, thus implying a certain hierarchy of wisdom.
‘Hierarchy of wisdom' may not be the most felicitous phrase, both because ‘wisdom' in modern English usage denotes some practical sagacity not necessarily int