The Northern Region of Korea: History, Identity, and Culture

From the publisher’s website:

The residents of the three northern provinces of Korea have long had cultural and linguistic characteristics that have marked them as distinct from their brethren in the central area near the capital and in the southern provinces. The making and legitimating of centralized Korean nation-states over the centuries, however, have marginalized the northern region and its distinct subjectivities.

Contributors to this book address the problem of amnesia regarding this distinct subjectivity of the northern region of Korea in contemporary, historical, and cultural discourses, which have largely been dominated by grand paradigms, such as modernization theory, the positivist perspective, and Marxism. Through the use of storytelling, linguistic analysis, and journal entries from turn-of-the-century missionaries and traveling Russians in addition to many varieties of unconventional primary sources, the authors creatively explore unfamiliar terrain while examining the culture, identity, and regional distinctiveness of the northern region and its people. They investigate how the northern part of the Korean peninsula developed and changed historically from the early Choson to the colonial period and come to a consensus regarding the importance of regionalism as a vital factor in historical transformation, especially in regard to Korea’s tumultuous modern era.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Thinking Through Region / Sun Joo Kim

1. Residence and Foreign Relation in the Peninsular Northeast During the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries / Kenneth R. Robinson
2. Choson-Qing Relations and the Society of P’yongan Province During the Late Choson Period / Kwon Naehyun
3. Regional Identities of Northern Literati: A Comparative Study of P’yongan and Hamgyong Provinces / Jan Yoo-Seung
4. The Shadow of Anonymity: The Depiction of Northerners in Eighteenth-Century “Hearsay Accounts” (kimun) / Jung Min
5. P’yongan Dialect and Regional Identity in Choson Korea / Paek Doo-Hyeon
6. Dialect, Orthography, and Regional Identity: P’yongan Christians, Korean Spelling Reform, and Orthographic Fundamentalism / Ross King
7. From Periphery to a Transnational Frontier: Popular Movements in the Northwestern Provinces, 1896-1904 / Yumi Moon
8. Subversive Narratives: Hwang Sunwon’s P’yongan Stories / Bruce Fulton
9. The Missionary Presence in Northern Korea before WWII: Human Investment, Social Significance, and Historical Legacy / Donald N. Clark
10. The Northern Region of Korea as Portrayed in Russian Sources, 1860s-1913 / German Kim and Ross King
11. Images of the North in Occupied Korea, 1905-1945 / Mark E. Caprio