Hwansoo Ilmee Kim. Empire of the Dharma

A bane of traditional nationalist discourses on Korean colonial history has been the tendency to create stark, across-the-board dichotomies of forces in action: imperial dominance–colonial suffering; imperial repression–colonial resistance (or, as a cross-theme, imperial control–colonial collaboration). Yet, in fact, even under the most authoritarian imperial regimes, not everything can always be so neatly categorized. Domestic and international factors sometimes create murky situations filled with paradoxes and ironies. On occasion, such situations allow those on the receiving end of imperialism to become imaginative players furthering their own visions and interests. Hwansoo Ilmee Kim sets out to demonstrate the power of such facts in a limited Korean-Japanese context, and he does his job with painstaking primary and secondary research, compelling detail, and eminently persuasive interpretation. The author seeks not to dismiss the larger Japanese imperial exploitation of Korea, but to lay out the nuanced truth about one particular facet of Japanese-Korean interactions. In the process, a bit of balance is infused into the more simplistic narratives of colonial Korea.

Ancient history · Colonialism · Dichotomy · Empire · Epistemology · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies