Organizer and Chair: Douglas L. Fix, Reed College
Discussant: Michael Robinson, University of Southern California
Simply stated, this panel of four papers attempts to examine the relationship between (re-)conceiving the nation and (re-)producing history in Korea and Taiwan at critical periods in the Twentieth Century. Participants assume that the nation's past is frequently constructed in response to the demands of the contentious present and concerned with imaging a new and different future. Furthermore, we are all concerned with the roles historians and the academic world in general play in this complex enterprise.
There is a certain symmetry in the makeup of the panel. The papers by Allen and Fix explore the historical writings of nationalist Korean and Taiwanese historians, who attempted to criticize Japanese colonial rule and narrate a new history that imagined, guided and supported the nation to be. Thus, their work examines nationalist historiography as anti-colonialist ideology and as a component of the decolonization process. Park's and Wu's contributions to the panel examine current innovative trends in Korean and Taiwanese historiography, respectively. Although both historians examine the social and political contexts that produced this new historiography and the indigenous legacies to which these new trends are connected, they explore significantly different themes. Park describes a new "scientific and practical historiography" whose subject and readership is the Korean people; a unified nation is clearly imagined by this new Korean history. In contrast, Wu is concerned with the colonial nature of "histories of Taiwan" and discusses the emergence of an alternative Taiwan-based history. While the former histories accompanied and rationalized colonial rule, the later is only now beginning to appear in academic circles in Taiwan, and Wu posits one method by which such a discipline could help one better understand Taiwan and Taiwanese affairs.
Together, the panelists are concerned with several significant questions: How do we analyze the linkages between the practice of history and the social, political, and ideological movements that critique and produce the nation? In what ways do specific conceptions of the nation restrict and weaken histories intended to support its emergence and growth? Conversely, can nationalist histories creatively produce a new community and consciousness that re visions and incorporates a contentious and complex past? In what sense can one speak of the hegemonic influence of elite histories constructed for the nation's needs, and how will academic attempts at popularizing and practicalizing this production affect the outcome? If new nationalist histories speak to the present and the future, what are their debts to disparate historiographical legacies, both recognized and unspoken?
Lastly, it is hoped that the incorporation of Korea and Taiwan and a concern with both past and present historiographies of these two nations will stimulate active questions and comments from the panel's discussant and members of the audience. Many of the issues addressed by this panel are timely and contested, and the panelists hope to encourage active debate and substantial scholarly exchange.
Ki Jong Park, Kook Min University
New historiographical trends in South Korea are closely related to social and political changes beginning in the late 1980s. These trends have fostered (and, in turn, have been influenced by) the rise of what has been termed a "new academic movement," emphasizing the reconsideration of existing social science methods. That movement has been led by young scholars, one of whose goals is the reconstruction of Korean history.
This new historiographical movement must be seen in connection with the tradition of modern Korean historiography that developed in the early 20th Century, in particular that practiced by nationalist historians and social/economic historians who wanted to expose Japanese activities in Korea. These 20th century nationalist and social/economic historians believed that the historical task for Korea at that time was achieving independence from Japan. In the process, they worked to establish a new historiographical method, which has become an important part of the discipline of history in South Korea today.
Recent new trends in Korean historiography have been influenced largely by the civil movement organized after 1980 to protest authoritarian military government. That movement presented the historical tasks of contemporary Korean society (i.e., democratization and reunification) quite clearly, and young historians set out to examine these issues by researching Korea's past while reconsidering the methodologies inherited from Korean historians.
Some of the new trends in Korean historical studies (often called "a scientific and practical historiography") include: a) increased attention to the lives of the people and the growth of their consciousness in Korea's traditional history, b) promotion of joint research instead of individual study, c) popularization of research findings via lectures and innovative publishing. This paper will examine these and other new trends in South Korean historiography beginning in the 1980s. It will include discussion of methodology, academic organizations and publications, as well as an analysis of the relationship between new methodologies and the Korean historiographical tradition, and of the future of Korean history.
Douglas L. Fix, Reed College
Among a small group of young intellectuals in the Japanese colony of Taiwan in the early 1930s there emerged a new, modernist nationalism grounded on a fundamental identity with Taiwan (the geographical space) and the Taiwanese-a people, a culture, and a world view. Although the sprouts of this new identity can be observed in the social and political movements of the 1920s, particularly those whose ultimate goal was the overthrow of colonial rule, it was the cultural movement of the 1930s that constructed for this Taiwanese nationalism a historical past and the possibility of a heroic future. This paper examines the production of the Taiwanese history that accompanied this nationalist and modernist project.
Based on our current knowledge of available texts, Lien Heng's A General History of Taiwan, published in 1920, was the first written Taiwanese product to conceive of and write out a unified narrative of human experiences that centered around Taiwan as place and Taiwanese as perspective. However, as many scholars have noted, Lien personally identified as much with historical China as he did with his native Taiwan, and that consciousness is clearly visible in his general history. This intellectual legacy, however, bore new fruit in the 1930s when writers, linguists, and critics began to experiment with the construction of a new Taiwanese literature and to debate its strengths and weaknesses from both theoretical and political perspectives. Furthermore, when radical social and political activism was no longer possible (as a result of increased Japanese suppression) after 1930, former activists engaged in a historicist assessment of the movement, seeking a clearer understanding of the sources of their failures. As sustained critique of Japanese colonialism and as introspective engagement with both personal and collective experiences, these intellectual activities produced a small but significant corpus that we now recognize as a Taiwanese history. It was an intellectual product created as much for the present as it was for an imagined future, and its narratives and subjects provide us valuable material for understanding the colonial roots of Taiwanese nationalism.
After a general assessment of the perspective, subjects, and stories of Lien's well-known classic, this paper examines several of the disparate, new histories written in the 1930s. Although the central topic of this research is the interaction of nation, identity and anti-colonialism in the production of history, I also address the issue of hegemonizing elite constructions that result when new heroes are created and old stories retold in the hopes of enacting decolonization (if not in the immediate present, surely in the imagined future).
Mi ch'a Wu, National Taiwan University
In August, 1993, a Preparatory Office for the Institute of Taiwanese History was established at Taiwan's Academia Sinica, making possible the concentrated and securely funded promotion of historical research on Taiwan and Taiwanese experiences. This new development presents a unique opportunity to examine previous constructions of "Taiwan history" and discuss how that subject has (and will) entered the academic world. This paper attempts to provide a new model for understanding the collective experiences of the Taiwanese after first critically examining several earlier attempts to construct (and regulate the production of) a "history of Taiwan."
The student of historiography on Taiwan is readily aware of the great impact foreign rule has had on the production of this field of study. Several colonial regimes attempted to bring "history" to the island as a component of and a rationale for colonial rule. However, the "history" thus produced began in regions outside the island, chronicled the transplantation of foreigners to Taiwan, and naturalized the colonial domination of such incoming powers. Japanese colonial rule, in particular, made a further contribution to the establishment of an alternative history by creating the socioeconomic infrastructure for the emergence of a new, modernist Taiwanese nationalism that emerged among a generation of young intellectuals born in the early Twentieth Century. However, the recolonization of the island by the Nationalist regime after 1945 precluded the development of a Taiwanese history to meet the demands of this new nationalism. Strictly speaking, such a Taiwan based historiography was only possible following the gains of the opposition political movement in the 1980s.
It is at this juncture in Taiwan's history that one can begin to research and write a Taiwan based history, one that would reject the perspectives of colonial overlords, establish Taiwan as the main subject of its narrative and description, chronicle time passed within that space called Taiwan, and give equal billing to all ethnic groups and their experiences. Although the centralizing element of such a history would be Taiwanese nationalism, the story told cannot be the simple tale of a linear development toward such an identity and consciousness. Instead, this Taiwan based historiography would analyze the contested interactions of the ethnic groups who inhabited the island and the contributions of each towards creating a common identity. Furthermore, given the varied and complex roles that Taiwan and her inhabitants have played in the history of neighboring regions, this new history must re map Taiwan and the Taiwanese continually in her/their appropriate regional and international contexts.
It is such a history that can render a better understanding of Taiwan than the perspectives and disciplines currently employed to such an end.
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