[KS] Re: Collaboration

[Pak, Jacqueline]

Dear List,

Thanks to all for interesting discussions and information on collaboration.

Here, I just wanted to say that Prof. Ledyard may have overstated and
possibly misappropriated my comment about collaboration as victimization. 
When I started to respond to a relatively simply query, I was not making a
blanket theoretical statement equating both. Nor did I suggest a new
"Jacqueline's paradigm" of collaboration as victimization.  In any case, I
agree with him and others that Yi Kwangsu or Kim Songsu or even any
ordinary acts of daily collaboration are all difficult and complex topics
and far more research and debates may be needed.

With my comments requesting greater sensitivity concerning this complex
issue, I was more interested in urging greater openness to new paradigmatic
possibilities in terms of understanding colonial history and modern history
in light of new and growing studies on the nature of nationalist movement. 


Prof. Ledyard mentioned, for example, the introduction from the famous and
controversial "Origins" from 1981 by Cumings and others. Having examined
the nationalist movement and leadership for the past decade or so, I began
to realize how much we did not know about the extent and severity of Korean
suffering and resistance.  (Perhaps, that is the serious lacuna of this and
other works as well.)  When a wholly new vista of political dynamics and
patterns of the Korean anticolonial struggle and resistance emerges, is it
not possible, after all, to reconsider the older paradigms?  

Of course, we are all much indebted to the early works which have helped to
shape our knowledge and guide the debates in important ways.  



Jacqueline Pak


----------
> From: michael robinson <mrobinso at indiana.edu>
> To: Gari Keith Ledyard <gkl1 at columbia.edu>
> Cc: Korean Studies Mailing List <korean-studies at mailbase.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: Collaboration
> Date: Thursday, February 04, 1999 8:39 AM
> 
> Dear List: 
> 
> I've been reading the discussion on collaboration.  A worthy if
> over doneissue in all historiography.  More history on all topics in my
opinion
> usually takes care of the issue.  The collaborator non-collaborator
> dichotomy is  fairly useless for  analysis.  It belies the very
complexity
> of
> human motivation and circumstances.  Gary is right, it seems useless to
> create elaborate arguments about Yi KS's collaboration.  His record
speaks
> for itself a complex life filled with activities the sum total of which
> remain ambiguous when weighed on a scale of moral judgements.  The
> designation seems useful for nationalist or identity polemicists, less
> important, perhaps, to others.  I would be in favor of more research on
> colonial Korea, but I would avoid leaping in to "solve" the collaboration
> issue.  It seems if we knew more about the whole, we would be in a better
> position to make these difficult and often unfair judgements about some
> dead person's "interests" "motives" "values" etc.  I also like Gari's
> questions regarding the concept of collaboration itself.  Another  word I
> frequently encountered is t'ahyop or (accommodation, compromise,) very
> slippery ideas but for most cultures necessary given the choices dumped
on
> any normal human being in a lifetime.  
> 
> I suppose these thoughts are part of a career of reading about people in
a
> colonial situation...attempting to put myself within their world and
> wondering how to solve the seemingly impossible riddles presented by the
> situation.   
> 
> 
> MikeRobinson


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