Andre Schmid is associate professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto.
Review
"A fascinating account, in sparkling prose, of the way Korean intellectuals thought forth a nation in the
years between the end of Chinese imperial relations in 1895 and the beginning of Japanese colonial rule in 1910.
Of interest -and relevance -to 'pre-post-colonial' forms of knowledge in many parts of the early twentieth-century
world."
--Carol Gluck, Columbia University
"A groundbreaking and border-crossing work in modern Korean intellectual history. A dazzling combination of
rich textual analysis, sustained argument engaging the latest historiography and theoretical literature, and limpid,
elegant prose, it lays bare the genealogy of twentieth-century Korean nationalist identity and consciousness and
challenges the embedded colonizer/colonized binary of much previous scholarship by situating that genealogy in
a universalizing discourse which simultaneously embraced both Korea and Japan."
--Cater Eckert, Harvard University
Columbia University Press Web Site, February, 2003
Summary
Korea Between Empires chronicles the development of a Korean national consciousness. It focuses on two critical
periods in Korean history and asks how key concepts and symbols were created and integrated into political programs
to create an original Korean understanding of national identity, the nation-state, and nationalism. Looking at
the often-ignored questions of representation, narrative, and rhetoric in the construction of public sentiment,
Andre Schmid traces the genealogies of cultural assumptions and linguistic turns evident in Korea´s major
newspapers during the social and political upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Newspapers were the primary location for the re-imagining of the nation, enabling readers to move away from the
conceptual framework inherited from a Confucian and dynastic past toward a nationalist vision that was deeply rooted
in global ideologies of capitalist modernity. As producers and disseminators of knowledge about the nation, newspapers
mediated perceptions of Korea's precarious place amid Chinese and Japanese colonial ambitions and were vitally
important to the rise of a nationalist movement in Korea.
Table of Contents
Introduction: A Monumental Story
1: The Universalizing Winds of Civilization
2: Decentering the Middle Kingdom and Realigning the East
3: Engaging a Civilizing Japan
4: Spirit, History, and Legitimacy
5: Narrating the Ethnic Nation
6: Peninsular Boundaries
7: Beyond the Peninsula
Epilogue
