Abstract
Advocates of Korean pseudohistory imagine early Korea to have comprised a vast continental empire. They accuse professional scholars, who reject their ideas, of promoting “colonial historiography” to the benefit of China and Japan. This polemic resonates with domestic political nationalism. In 2014–15 it caused the termination of two government-funded projects, and a similar incident occurred in 2023. Despite a series of critiques, pseudohistory continues to thrive, particularly in the popular domain, and cannot be ignored. The challenge is how to address it. The author suggests two directions that can attend to pseudohistory while offering constructive areas for new research. The first is to pay attention to a discourse of Korean scholarship that focuses on regions extending beyond the conventional boundaries of Early Korea. This discourse represents a critical counterpart to pseudohistorical narratives of expansive empire, while its study enables engagement with Korean scholarship. The second suggestion is wider discourse analysis. For given topics of early Korea and Asia, we should model popular and pseudohistorical discourse alongside scholarly discourse, thus attending to popular and public domains. To address online, screen, and real-world sites of historical discourse, this article calls for constructive collaboration from a wider disciplinary spectrum of Korean studies and communication fields.
