Regionality and Memory in History : Heroification of Kim Kyŏngsŏ

Le 26 janvier 2016

Dans le cadre du séminaire spécial de l’UMR 8173 “Chine, Corée, Japon”,

Kim Sunjoo

(Harvard-Yenching Professor of Korean History, Harvard University)
Professeure invitée à l’EHESS,

donne une conférence intitulée

 “Regionality and Memory in History: Heroification of Kim Kyŏngsŏ“

à la salle 681, à 10h-12h

Le France, 190-198 avenue de France, 75013 Paris.

Résumé

Numerous scholarly works on “memory projects” as the culture and politics of nation-states in the modern world have been produced. Yet remaking of the past is not the monopoly of modernity. This lecture investigates the problem of engineering memory in Chosŏn Korea. In particular, I examine the emergence of new cultural imagery built by the state and its “national” elites to legitimate the state’s rule and its position in the changing environment of East Asia. This “national” project involved intellectual movements to revisit and rewrite Chosŏn Korea’s historical past. At the same time, I investigate the construction of cultural identity by local elites as manifested in various cultural projects. In particular, I analyze the processes of inventing, commemorating, and enshrining “public memory”—and the historical and cultural contexts in which such processes took place—through the case of Kim Kyŏngsŏ, a commanding general during the Ming-Chosŏn joint war against the rising Jurchen in 1619.