Saeyoung Park - "From Zero to Hero: Memory and Counter-narrative in the Early Modern Korean Public Sphere"

Saeyoung Park, Assistant Professor of History, Davidson College

This paper examines the rehabilitation of General Im Kyŏngŏp, a seventeenth-century official in Chosŏn Korea. Im served variously under Ming, Qing, and Chosŏn command, at times even leading forces against a country that had rewarded him for previous meritorious service. Hence, his life reflected the fraught transnational context of the Ming-Manchu conflict in the tumultuous seventeenth-century. But by the late eighteenth-century, the Chosŏn state promoted Im as an ideal subject and honored his loyal service through state-sanctioned commemoration. Today, the memory of Im remains largely positive; twenty-first century Koreans know him predominantly as a Chosŏn hero or as the object of shamanic supplication.

By juxtaposing official accounts, literati essays, legal cases, and historical fiction, this paper’s excavation of hidden narratives reveals that Im was far from the hero that he has been imagined to be. Actually, Im was a deserter and a suspected traitor at the time of his death. This paper suggests that Im’s rehabilitation attests to the growing power of a reading public and the influence of popular culture on political discourse in an early modern public sphere.