Book Review

Asia

In Benedict Anderson's apt but by-now hackneyed phrase, all ethnic and national groups are "imagined communities." Especially during the last two centuries, the intellectual and political enterprise of defining and seeking nationhood has sprung up everywhere and has been hyperactive in producing both benign and malignant concepts and forms of nationhood and nationalism. Those engaged in this endeavor have selectively harnessed history, memories of heroic accomplishment and suffering (within or without shared territory), myths, religion, secular traditions, and a host of other cultural forces to forge or strengthen claims of nationhood on behalf of their compatriots. Such efforts have inevitably been subject to challenges and revisions in evolving local, regional, and global contexts. In some cases, the issues first raised by these efforts in the late 1800s have, in new mutations, continued to shape scholarly and citizen discourse as well as politics and policy down to the present, in a sense reducing all history to the oxymoron called contemporary history.

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This, in a nutshell, is the nature and scope of Andre Schmid's inquiry in its focus on modern Korean history, and, despite the book's title, he makes many connections to later decades of colonial, postliberation, and contemporary Korea. The result is a breathtaking historiography, magisterial in sweep, elegant in structure, lucid in idiom, and insightful and illuminating in interpretation. These qualities, products of the author's astute mind and meticulous and confident command of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese sources, make his study a rare work of synthesis in an age when monographs of microspecialization seem to crowd out bird's-eye-view histories of this kind. The reader of Schmid's work feels as if the writer is taking him along on a carefully planned aerial journey across a stimulating historical landscape, all the while telling intelligent stories about the significant forests, marshes, hollows, croplands, sand dunes, meadows, lakes, shorelines, and other features that makeup the whole.

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