Introduction

This introduction provides an overview of the metahistorical questions driving this book: what are the philosophical origins undergirding Korea's ethnic nationalism, and how can a nation resist colonialism when it re-inscribes the terms of the colonizer in its imagination of freedom? This section opens the project by reflecting on a recent event that encapsulated the fraught space of contemporary politics in modern Korean historiography, and considers what it means to imagine more moral—and not just political—forms of history writing. In so doing, the introduction unpacks why Derrida's deconstructive analysis of Western metaphysics is not only relevant but also significant within Korean Studies.