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Daham Chong, professor at Sangmyung University

Daham CHONG is professor of history at Sangmyung University in Seoul. Chong earned his Ph.D. in Korean history at Korea University. He has been rewriting early Chosŏn history as highlighted within the nationalist narrative of South Korean historiography by using postcolonial and transnational approaches. He has been reinterpreting the major projects of King Sejong in the fifteenth Century, including the Hunmin chŏngŭm vernacular alphabet, by rethinking their inseparable and translative relationship to Yuan, Ming, Jurchens, and Japan. Also He has been rewriting post-1945 South Korean historiorgraphy on Koryŏ and Chosŏn based on a transnational approach by historicizing it within the particular transpacific historical context of East Asia in Cold War era.

 

Conférences de CHONG Daham
Professeur d’histoire, Université Sangmyung, Séoul
Professeur invité à l’EHESS, janvier 2025
sur proposition d’Isabelle Sancho et Alain Delissen (CCJ-CRC)

 14 janvier : Séminaire « Intelligences de la Corée »

EHESS, Campus Condorcet, 2 cours des humanités, 93300 Aubervilliers
Salle 25.A, 10h30-12h30

« Narrative of Zhengfa: War as a Ritual in the Making of 15th-Century Chosŏn. »

Contrary to the view of nationalist South Korean historiography that has deliberately concealed the aggressive character of 15th-century Chosŏn, the war against the Jurchens and Tsushima was not merely self-defense, but a concrete manifestation of the early Chosŏn’s conception of its position in the East Asian political order, in which Chosŏn was regarded as the rightful suzerain over the Jurchen and Tsushima polities. Such violence was defined as a “war of punishment and correction of the world order,” zhengfa (Kr. chongbŏl), to establish the self and the other as enforcers against the disturber. This was an appropriation of the rhetoric of the “Sinitic” universal empire by the Chosŏn kings, who portrayed their role as aggressors as divinely mandated punishers carrying out retribution against those who disrupted the Chosŏn-centered hierarchy. Thus, proclamations of war were accompanied by assertions that the Jurchens were vassals of the Chosŏn and that the Chosŏn kings were like benevolent parents against whom the Jurchens were committing parricide. Since each war was a symbolic enactment of this perceived relationship, the rituals and traditional sciences of warfare functioned to emphasize this vertical hierarchy. From the departure of soldiers to their return to the capital, Chosŏn employed a powerful combination of rituals and technologies, including sacrifices, clocks, calendars, and firearms, to legitimize its conduct of war and present itself as the guardian of heavenly prerogatives. Warfare was not simple aggression, but an elaborate ceremony to inscribe a particular power relationship, with Chosŏn becoming a “lesser suzerain” that defined Jurchen and Japanese frontier societies as its own “vassals,” even as it itself remained a “vassal” to the larger “Sinitic” world order centered around the Ming.

Vendredi 17 janvier : Séminaire du PRI « Les sciences sociales et le monde »

EHESS, Campus Condorcet, 2 cours des humanités, 93300 Aubervilliers
Salle A327, 14h-17h

Séance pilotée par Alain Delissen : “Which discipline, where, and when are “Confucianism” and Confucian studies?”

Conférence de Chong Daham :

« South Korean Historiography on Civil Service Examination, Max Weber, and the Cold War Transpacific Invention of Confucian Modernity »

This talk will offer a postcolonial critique of Japanese colonial historiography and post-1945 South Korean historiography of Korea’s Confucian tradition, which both share a highly essentialized understanding of Korea’s Confucian tradition as the uniqueness of Korean society based on the same overarching narrative of evolutionary modernization, despite their contradictorily different definitions of it as either pre-modern backwardness or Confucian modernity. In order to move beyond this still dominant bipolar view of Korea’s Confucian tradition, this talk will attempt to show, from a transnational perspective, how post-1945 South Korean historiography has redefined Korea’s Confucian tradition. To do so, it will historicize post-1945 South Korean historiography’s appropriation of Max Weber’s theories of bureaucracy and modernization from U.S. social science and East Asian studies for its studies of the Koryŏ-Chosŏn civil service examination and social status system. Then, it will examine how post-1945 South Korean historiography of late Koryŏ and early Chosŏn history from 1945 to early 2000 has struggled to redefine and reinvent Korea’s Confucian tradition, such as the Koryŏ-Chosŏn civil service examination, as the unique origin of its own meritocratic modernity as close as “Western modernity,” based on this appropriation of Max Weber’s theories of bureaucracy and modernization. It will then turn to rethinking the significance of this appropriation in the broader context of the Cold War and South Korean postcoloniality.

Séminaire « Intelligences de la Corée » 28 janvier

EHESS, Campus Condorcet, 2 cours des humanités, 93300 Aubervilliers
Salle 25.A, 10h30-12h30

« Bridging the Sound of Country’s Language and the Letters of Middle Kingdom: A Transnational Reading of Hunmin chŏngŭm 訓民正音 Promulgation»

This paper examines how fifteenth-century Chosŏn ruling elites sought to use spoken and written language to establish the authority of the royal house, which was essentially the process of translating the “universal” values of the “Sinographic cosmopolis” onto Chosŏn soil. The dynasty’s preoccupation with language is striking in early Chosŏn historical accounts. First, the ruling house showed an obsessive devotion to learning the spoken language of China proper. At the same time, the Hanliwen 漢吏文 protocol in use since the Yuan, the language of diplomacy, was an active component of study. Second, the Chosŏn phonetic alphabet systematized by King Sejong 世宗, (Kr. Hunmin chŏng’ŭm 訓民正音) was also an important development of the early fifteenth century. However, because of the nationalist discourses on “national language,” the central question of why so much attention was paid to learning Chinese and at the same time attempting to create an indigenous Chosŏn writing system during this period has not been answered by those scholars who want to understand the two phenomenal language issues as polar opposites and as an inherent contradiction that cannot be explained. Therefore, there is a need for a new perspective that transcends the limitations imposed by nationalist/colonialist historiography and takes a transnational view of the historical context of East Asia in the early fifteenth century. Within the particular historical context of the global order of fifteenth-century East Asia, the two functions performed by Chosŏn Hunming chŏng’ŭm were to actualize the Ming court’s Shengjiao 聲教 by propagating the standardized Ming language transliterated into the indigenous language, and to propagate Chosŏn’s own Sŏnggyo 聲教 with its indigenous language. These two roles appear to be contradictory from a nationalist perspective, but in reality they were inextricably intertwined in the overall political scheme, with one being inseparable from the other. Politically, Chosŏn appropriated the Ming’s status of the “Middle Kingdom” by deliberately defining itself as a “vassal” state position of the Ming, and in doing so it was guaranteed the right to spread its “own” sŏnggyo on its own soil. This was expressed in the inseparable connection between the two language systems, like two sides of a single coin. In other words, Chosŏn accepted Sinicization as an ultimate act of desinicization, an act designed to free itself from the overarching Neo-Confucian political hierarchy that reduced Chosŏn to a mere vassal. In the practice of language politics, Chosŏn established itself as a second-tier civilization, not equal to Ming, but still the second-best civilized state as one well versed in the civilized language of the empire.

30 janvier : séminaire d’Alain Delissen « Histoire de la Corée moderne : transitions historiographiques ? »

EHESS, 2 cours des humanités 93300 Aubervilliers
Salle A302, 10h30-12h30

« Transnational Reading of Confucian Modernity in East Asia: Reinvention of Early Chosǒn’s Sadae (事大), Kyorin (交隣), and Sojunghwa (小中華) Discourses in Post-1945 South Korean Historiography.»

It has become a dominant idea among most Koreans that Korea’s Confucian tradition laid the foundation for its unprecedented “miraculous” modernization. What they fail to realize, however, is that not so long ago their proud Confucian tradition was labeled a plague of backwardness. This paper is part of my larger project in which I will explain this gap as an “invention of tradition,” a redefinition of Korea’s Confucian tradition by post-1945 South Korean historians working within the “transnational” context of nation-state building. Drawing on the particular format of the trans-temporal and trans-spatial comparative approach, I will focus on critically analyzing the historical context of post-1945 nation-state building in South Korea in relation to the U.S. and Japan, and what ultimately enabled South Korean nationalist historians to reclaim the “sadae,” “kyorin,” and “sojunghwa” discourses of Chosŏn based on sinocentrism from colonial characterization as a “shameful” and “backward” tradition. By rethinking post-1945 South Korean historiography and the reality of the Cold War context of that time, I will explain that Sadae, Kyorin, and Sojunghwa, which post-1945 South Korean historiography labeled as a “unique” proud tradition of Chosŏn’s civilized diplomacy based on Confucian worldview, were actually discursive traditions invented through the transnational process in which South Korea had to encounter the U.S. and Japan again in the new Cold War world order even to define its own identity and sovereignty.


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Eun-joo Carrè-Na (24 octobre 2024). Daham Chong, professor at Sangmyung University. Carnets du Centre Corée. Consulté le 20 juillet 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/12k9n


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