ABSTRACT
This chapter makes the case that there is a crisis in postcolonial discourse emerging from Cold War politics in Korea. Offering a literature review of postcolonial theory, the chapter puts postcolonial theory and criticism rooted in South Asia in conversation with postcolonial discourse in Korea's intellectual history. In bringing these two discourses together, the chapter unpacks the following: why, on the one hand, Jacques Derrida's method of deconstruction as a practice of critical reading is relevant to the study of modern Korea's cultural and intellectual history, and why, on the other hand, the case of colonial modernity in Korea can intervene in the existing paradigms of postcolonial criticism. The chapter situates Derrida's concept of hauntology, which appears in his Specters of Marx, as a deconstructive method already outlined in his earlier work, Of Grammatology.
