Sitings : Critical Approaches to Korean Geography

by Tangherlini, Timothy R.; Yea, Sallie

• ISBN13: 9780824831387
• ISBN10: 0824831381
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-03-01
• Publisher: Univ of Hawaii Pr

Summary

For more than half of the twentieth century, the Korean peninsula has been divided between two hostile and competitive nation-states, each claiming to be the sole legitimate expression of the Korean nation. The division remains an unsolved problem dating to the beginnings of the Cold War and now projects the politics of that period into the twenty-first century. Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey is designed to provide readers with the historical essentials upon which to unravel the complex politics and contemporary crises that currently exist in the East Asian region. Beginning with a description of late-nineteenth-century imperialism, Michael Robinson shows how traditional Korean political culture shaped the response of Koreans to multiple threats to their sovereignty after being opened to the world economy by Japan in the 1870s. He locates the origins of both modern nationalism and the economic and cultural modernization of Korea in the twenty years preceding the fall of the traditional state to Japanese colonialism in 1910.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction-Constructed Places, Contested Spaces: Critical Geographies and Korea	p. 1
Geographies of the (Colonial) City
Respatializing Choson's Royal Capital: The Politics of Japanese Urban Reforms in Early Colonial Seoul, 1905-1919	p. 15
Demolishing Colony: The Demolition of the Old Government-General Building of Choson	p. 39
Geographies of the (Imagined) Village
Choson Memories: Spectatorship, Ideology, and the Korean Folk Village	p. 61
Blame Walt Rostow: The Sacrifice of South Korea's Natural Villages	p. 83
Geographies of Religion
Auspicious Places in a Mobile Landscape: Of Shamans, Shrines, and Dreams	p. 101
Kyeryong Mountain as a Contested Place	p. 121
Kyongju Namsan: Heterotopia, Place-Agency, and Historiographic Leverage	p. 141
Geographies of the Margin
The Seoul Train Station Square and Homeless Shelters: Thoughts on Geographical History Regarding Welfare Citizenship	p. 159
Cyberspace and a Space for Gays in South Korea	p. 173
Marginality, Transgression, and Transnational Identity Negotiations in Korea's Kijich'on	p. 186
Works Cited	p. 205
List of Contributors	p. 229
Index	p. 231
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