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The ancestral origins of Yi Sŏnggye, the founder of the Chosŏn dynasty, have long misled historians due to their mythologized depictions in the official histories. Japanese scholars have suspected that his ancestors might have been Jurchens in disguise. Numerous Korean scholars took offense to such overtures and reacted defensively, accepting the official narrative at face value. By focusing on the question of their ethnic identity, this article argues that these scholars have inadvertently overlooked that Yi Sŏnggye’s ancestors had served a family that rebelled against Koryŏ during the Mongol invasions and that Yi Sŏnggye’s father eventually double-crossed them and appropriated their wealth and position. This long history of ruthless opportunism became problematic when the new dynasty sought to inspire unconditional loyalty from its subjects. The dynasty thereby altered the accounts of Yi’s ancestors to obscure their involvement in the rebellious breakaway polity in the northeast, the Ssangsŏng Directorate-General (1258–1356).

Periodization is a key element in the organization of archaeological research as well as an instrument through which political ideas can be conveyed. This article provides a comparison of two systems created during and after the Japanese colonial period whose aim was the periodization of Korean archaeology. In this regard, it compares the systems of Fujita Ryosaku and Kim Wŏllyong and how these illustrate the contrasting purposes of intellectual inquiry in the colonial and postcolonial periods. In addition, it aims to locate postcolonial archaeological scholarship within a larger frame of reference than a simplistic colonial-postcolonial structure. To do this, it investigates the influence of Western intellectual thought on Korean archaeology. As a result, the decolonization of Korean archaeology can be judged within the scope of world archaeology in the 1970s.

This article deals with the disappearance of hunting in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) to reconsider human-centered narratives of modern authoritarianism. I examine how the perception of hunting in North Korea changed through Pyongyang’s ineffective efforts to classify and exploit animals according to their perceived value in building socialism. In particular, I highlight local understandings of fauna and the gradual disappearance of conventional hunting from state media, a reflection of the disorganized attempts to regulate hunting and mobilize animals for material ends. Contrary to these ambitions, local populations compelled the regime into a tacit compromise, resulting in official silence on hunting.

The “comfort women” issue is one of the most contentious and emotionally charged disputes between South Korea and Japan. Its political sensitivity is so acute that it has often been treated as a taboo subject, even within the field of Korean literature. In this study, I analyze the English translation of Han myŏng (One Left), the 2016 Korean novel devoted to the subject of comfort women by Kim Sum (Kim Soom). This work is unique in that it is based on testimonies from surviving comfort women and contains over 300 endnotes citing the sources of the testimonies. My analysis explores how the translation captures the experiences and memories of the victims. Specifically, I focus on eight key aspects: (1) the creation of a temporary shift in the narrator’s voice, (2) the complexities of thought representation, (3) the use of different spelling, (4) how the translation conveys expressive meaning, (5) the adoption of the generic “you,” (6) the metaphor of comfort women as consumables, (7) the clarification of cultural subtext for the reader, and (8) the endnotes. Following this analysis, I examine the omission of an episode from the translation—an authorial choice that could be misinterpreted as an unfaithful rendering of the original. My analysis suggests that the narrative surrounding comfort women can be expanded and refined through translation.

This article examines the apocalyptic landscape of neoliberal South Korea through two postmillennial webtoons Sweet Home (스위트홈, 2020) and All of Us Are Dead (지금 우리 학교는, 2022), whose Netflix adaptations achieved global success during the COVID-19 lockdown. Through a comparative analysis of these zombie/monster horrors, the article challenges the existing discourse around the transnational, transmedia flow of Hallyu 韓流 (Korean wave). It does so by addressing the interconnected issues of genre, generation, and gender in these dystopic coming-of-age narratives, where endangered youths struggle for survival under a necropolitical order. The emergence of such zombified/monsterized subjects is linked to an aesthetics of relational survivance (hangjon 抗存) and to a vision of trans-species alliance, situated within Korea’s rapid neoliberalization and evolving popular protests. The article adopts a posthuman feminist perspective in tackling the affective dynamic running through the original webtoons, the participatory culture of the audience, and media convergence amid an antifeminist backlash in contemporary Korea. Alongside nuanced readings of graphic texts that elicit multisensory engagement and diverse viewer responses, its intersectional approach to the evolution of K-apocalypse, as inflected by Netflix, argues for the critical contextualization of the political, ethical, and ontological question of surviving as (non-)humans at the end of the world.

Internal development theory (naejaejŏk palchŏnnon) has been one of the most influential and enduring approaches to the systematic study of Korean history since its classic articulation in the 1960s by Yi Kibaek (1924–2004) in Han’guksa sillon (1967, rev. ed. 1976). Scholars see both the influence of modernization theory and resonance with Marxist history in Yi’s language choices. More importantly, it makes Koreans actors in their historical development, unlike Japanese theories of the colonial period which imagined Korea as merely a geographic area acted upon by outside forces. Internal development theory is conventionally invoked in two modes. The first is in its modern mode to advance the position that the “sprouts of capitalism” had appeared and would eventually have led toward Western-style modernization if Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) was not colonized by Imperial Japan (1868–1945). The second is in its premodern mode, where it asserts that the rise of new social groups were the primary cause of political change. Scholars have tested the premodern mode of internal development theory and, although some aspects are not completely persuasive, the basic premise continues to be influential. This essay presents a draft translation of the last chapter of the revised edition of Han’guksa sillon, “Han’guksa ŭi palchŏn kwa chibae seryŏk” (Development and ruling power in Korean history), which was not included in Edward Wagner’s translation (1984). This hitherto untranslated chapter articulates the way Yi conceptualized what came to be known as the internal development theory.