Theory's Imaginal Other: American Encounters with South Korea and Japan

Abstract

Negotiating the postmodern terrain of the 1990s, it may now be the case that "Korea," like "Japan," must be warily inflected in quotation marks. Haunted by the American political imaginary, that is to say, "Korea" gets produced and projected as a cultural sign and occidental distortion from within some redemptive master narrative of global modernization. Or, worse yet, as Edward Said contends in a critique of the most textually selfscrupulous or "postparadigm" anthropology, this conflicted nation-state can be articulated only from within unequal structurations of capital/symbolic