Constructing “Korean” Origins

Pai takes an archeological perspective on how the Korean identity has been destroyed, altered, and rewritten. She explores the need for Koreans to reclaim their racial-national identity. She explores Korea's need for identity through the facts and arguments of social migration, ethnic diffusion, parallel evolution, and cultural trade and theft...This is an interesting book, at times quite provocative...[and] loaded with revealing facts...[Pai] has produced a studied research, a solid reference source that could be used in an activist's argument on Korean issues of identity. -- Bill Drucker * Korean Quarterly *
This major contribution to both intellectual history and archaeology traces and analyzes the stories fashioned by Japanese colonial scholars and Korean nationalists to account for Korean origins. Theoretically sophisticated, widely read, and armed with a fine sense of irony, [Pai] shows how, despite themselves, Korean nationalists accepted concepts developed by their Japanese predecessors, and how efforts to fashion a common ancestry to serve as the basis for a shared postcolonial national identity continue in both Koreas today...[Pai] goes beyond discussing the evidence or lack of same for various theories, and offers her own eminently cogent interpretation of cultural interaction with China and state formation. -- C. Schirokauer * Choice *