Nation, State, and People: Colonialism and the Formation of Divided Nation-States in Korea.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the influence of colonialism upon postcolonial societal trajectories. Focusing on the years leading up to Korea’s liberation and then partition into North and South, it examines the nature of Japanese colonial rule from 1910 through 1945, its relationship to the brief but decisive period of American military occupation from the fall of 1945 to 1948, and the impact of both on postcolonial conflict and South Korea’s separate nation-state formation.

The study advances three central arguments. First, building on earlier work that critiques standard dichotomized models, which treat the colonizers and colonized in isolation from each other, it demonstrates that we need to attend more closely to the interactions and evolving dynamics that shape their encounter. This perspective highlights what I believe is the key to understanding the Japanese colonial rule: the ways in which their imperial governance sowed the seeds of internal differentiation among the Korean people, which undermined a sense of national identity and sparked continued internal conflicts.

Second, this work analyzes how the continuity from colonial to postcolonial was realized only through the historical process of liberation and the American occupation periods in South Korea. The important argument of this process-centered approach is that while the historical experience of colonialism exerts a profound influence upon emergent postcolonial societies, colonial legacies are not passed on in precisely the same way; rather, they are contingent on particular historical processes.

Third, this study highlights the social consequences of colonial experience by examining how internal conflicts that were created and rearticulated through Japanese colonial rule and then American military occupation played a pivotal role in formulating the historically shifting meaning of membership in the national community, thus providing the historical and social basis for separate nation-state formation in South Korea. It demonstrates one of the most important consequences of the colonial regime: its capacity to produce and reshape sources of internal conflict, whether religious, ethnic, or class-based, among the colonized, and how such conflict in turn plays a pivotal role in shaping a particular state form and political trajectory for postcolonial societies.