UCLA

This dissertation, “From Colonial to International: American knowledge construction of Korean history, 1880s-1960s” studies how knowledge on Korean history was constructed in the United States while being influenced by Japanese colonial scholarship from the late nineteenth century throughout the Japanese colonization of Korea (1910-1945), and how this knowledge influenced postwar Korean Studies in the U.S., established in the 1960s. Taking a transnational approach, the dissertation looks at how the knowledge on colonized Korea was constructed by multiple national agents—namely Japanese colonial scholars, American missionaries and their children, and Korean nationalist intellectuals—and how their knowledge on Korea, despite their different political purposes, was compatible with and influenced by each other. It also takes a fresh perspective in looking at Korean Studies in the U.S., which has been regarded as the product of Cold War politics during the postwar period, by tracing the earlier influence of prewar knowledge which reflected colonial scholarship. This dissertation argues that the history of colonized Korea was produced as a “discourse of failure” in which its contents were organized in a way to explain Korea’s being colonized and losing national sovereignty. From the late nineteenth century in the U.S., this knowledge construction was developed to emphasize Korea’s isolationism during the colonial period while partially integrating themes—such as stagnancy and heteronomy—from the Japanese colonial scholarship. This dissertation argues that the transnational co-authorship of Korean history confirmed it as the objective knowledge of Korea. Then, it argues that despite the discontinuity caused by changes in power dynamics, including the Pacific War and the emergence of Cold War politics, many themes from the colonial past were reconfigured to shape the basis of postwar Korean Studies in the U.S. in the 1960s. This dissertation looks at how these reshaped themes came to serve new functions, such as supporting modernization theory within Cold War politics.