미국-영국 선교사와 외교관이 주도한 근대한국학 전문화와 시스템 만들기, 1900-1940년: Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society-Korean Branch 분석을 중심으로

초록

The article aims to reappraise the characteristics and legacy of Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch(RASKB) and its official Journal, Transactions of the Korea Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in the historiography of modern Korean studies. By analysing its membership, interpreting the contents/subject-matters, and examining the new mode of writing strategies of the Transactions published from 1900 to 1940, the author is very convinced that both RASKB and Transactions had played a critical and indispensable role in professionalizing and systematizing the field of Korean studies. The Transactions, a forum dominated by British and American missionaries and diplomats, demonstrates the maturity of modern Korean studies in the first half of the 20th century, thus standing at the apex of “the First Wave of Modern Korean Studies.” Imperial Japanese scholars imitated and appropriated the Western-made First Wave and had established “the First and Half Wave of Modern Korean Studies” for the purpose of legitimizing colonialization of Korea. And “the Second Wave of Modern Korean Studies” during the 1930s, which emphasized the Korean Studies by Koreans and for Koreans, was to a certain degree the extended and reinvented outcome founded on the previous two Waves. The author concludes that modern Korean studies is a hybrid (re)production of multiple nationalities and that transnational perspectives would shed an alternative light to disclose non-nationalist and post-colonial peculiarities of ‘Knowledge/Power’ usually known as ‘the discourse on Korea.’

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