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Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 11, Number 4, 2010

ISSN 1464–9373 Print/ISSN 1469–8447 Online/10/040488–08 © 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14649373.2010.506771

Notions of the Third World and national literatures in the ageof globalization

PAIK Nak-chung

Taylor and FrancisRIAC_A_506771.sgm10.1080/14649373.2010.506771Inter-AsiaCulturalStudies1464-9373 (print)/1469-8447 (online)OriginalArticle2010Taylor &Francis114000000December 2010Nak-ChungPaik [email protected]

My topic is ‘Notions of the Third World andnational literatures in the age of globaliza-tion’. What I will do is briefly discuss global-ization first, and then go on to address thenotions of the Third World, and then ofnational literatures, with particular focus onSouth Korean literary discourse.

As far as globalization is concerned,I think actually it is a tendency inherent incapitalism; in that sense, it is nothing new, ithas been going on for many centuries. Andwe can say that by the mid and late 19thcentury, when East Asia was incorporatedinto the world market, globalization had become an actual reality on this earth.

Now I want to add an interjectoryremark. When I say ‘East Asia’, with yourkind permission and generous understand-ing, I would like to include China, although

China used to call itself the center of theworld, and even now it actually occupiesmore than Eastern Asia, sharing borderswith West Asia, South Asia and so on.

It is true globalization has reached anew and fuller phase by now, and we candate this from the end of 1980s and early1990s, when the Soviet socialist bloccollapsed, and the global spread of capitalistinstitutions has become much faster andmore intense, and more far-reaching. We

could also mention the phenomenon ofChina’s turn to what it calls ‘socialism withChinese characteristics,’ which some observ-ers consider a euphemism for ‘capitalismwith Chinese characteristics’.

I personally have some doubts as towhether this is the final phase of capital-ism, that is, this kind of globalization led by capital that we usually call ‘neo-liberal

globalization’, may not be the final phase ofcapitalist world-economy. But I will talkmore about this later.

This new phase of globalization has brought challenges to the notions both ofThird World and of national literatures.First, I will say something about notions of

the Third World.When I say the new phase of globaliza-

tion has brought challenges to the notions ofthe Third World, what you can obviouslynotice is that, of the three worlds – First,Second and Third worlds – the second onehas disappeared during this phase; that is,with the demise of the Soviet socialist bloc.But even prior to that, there were manyproblems with the concept of the ThirdWorld: how to classify the three worlds, andalso which countries or areas to place within

each of those categories. Of course, the mostcommon classification was to consider theadvanced capitalist countries as the FirstWorld, the socialist bloc as the Second, andthe rest as the Third World. But there wasalso the alternative scheme put forward byMao Zedong, in which the two superpowersform the First World, with the intermediatepowers like England, France and so onforming the Second World, and the restconstitute the Third World, including

China, Korea and many countries of Asia,Africa and Latin America.So it is always uncertain as to how to

define the Third World, and once you havedefined it, which countries to put into it, andwhich to exclude. Additionally, when youhave made up the list, you have the problemthat these countries are so numerous anddiverse, in terms of types, wealth, size and



Notions of the Third World and national literatures 489

so on, that there’s always some doubt as towhether you could group them together asthe

Third World. Thus, there used to besome talks of the Fourth World to designatethose really poor countries in certain partsof Asia and Africa.

In South Korea, too, we have had a lotof debate on this question, but for my part,I chose to get out of the difficulties in adifferent way. My idea was to get rid of allthis tangled debate about how to classify theThird World by saying that the idea of theThird World, or the purpose of our bringingup the notion of the Third World, is not todivide the world into three parts, but themain use of this term was actually to see theworld as a single world; only, to see it notfrom the point of view of the rich and strong

in the so-called First and Second worlds, butfrom the point of view of ordinary people.That was the way I tried to formulate theThird World perspective, so there’s no needto argue about which country belongs towhich part.

In South Korea, the 1970s was the highpoint of the discourse of the Third Worldand Third World Literature. Of course, inthe background, as everyone knows, therewas the Bandong Conference in the 1950s,

which started the ‘non-aligned movement’,pursuing the third way instead of aligningitself either with the advanced capitalistcountries or the communist nations. Alsothere had been earlier debates about theThird World in Europe, especially in France,and there was some influence of Mao’snotion of the three worlds, even though hiswriting was taboo in South Korea; and thenthere was the influence of liberation theol-ogy, and so on.

In the literary field, the poet Kim Chi-

Ha – I don’t know whether many of youare familiar with him, he was in prisonmany times during the 1970s for writingpoetry strongly criticizing the governmentand became sort of a world-famous figurewhen he was in prison – was accused of being a communist and, having beensentenced to death, he smuggled out his‘Statement of Conscience’, claiming libera-tion theology and the idea of the Third

World as his intellectual background,rather than communism, as he was beingaccused.

All these influences worked together topromote the discourse of Third World litera-ture. This was at that time directly opposed

to the official line taken by the South Koreangovernment. Like the Taiwanese govern-ment, the South Korean government at thetime was firmly aligned with the UnitedStates. South Korea was a kind of front linestate in the Cold War, and even though it paidlip service to friendship with other ThirdWorld countries, it really had no intention of being close to them. It was actually the NorthKorean regime that took a very active part inthe non-aligned movement.

However, because the South Korean

intellectual discourse about Third World atthe time developed against the frame of theofficial line, and in spite of governmentdisapproval and sometimes repression,I think it has had a longer life than the NorthKorean discourse. I don’t think in NorthKorea there is much talk about the ThirdWorld or the non-aligned movement now,since the non-aligned movement more orless collapsed after the end of the East–WestCold War.

During the 1980s, South Korean people became somewhat less interested in theThird World, partly because of the resur-gence of classical or dogmatic Marxism.That is, after the Gwangju massacre in 1980,the student movement became more radi-calized and in a certain sense moredogmatic. Then, the demise of the SecondWorld, at the end of the 1980s, further weak-ened the Third World discourse, but thereare some continuities between the ThirdWorld discourse of the 1970s and 1980s, and

the newly introduced post-colonial theoriesin the 1990s. For all these reasons, in SouthKorea nowadays not too many people talkabout the Third World, and many peoplefeel that the term ‘Third World’ reallydoesn’t make much sense.

But recently, there have been signs ofrevival in building solidarity with otherAsian and African writers. In 2007, we heldan Asia-Africa Literature Festival in the city



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Paik Nak-chung

of Jeonju. This was the first gathering ofthese writers since the last Afro-AsianWriters’ Conference held in the 1980s. Thefocus in this new gathering of Asian andAfrican writers has been an attempt to build bridges not only among ourselves but with

the First World as well. In part, this worked.Obviously this is because the Cold War hascome to an end, and the kind of stance theAfro-Asian writers used to take – whichwas more favorable to the Second Worldthan to the First – has become pointless. Butthis also reflects a new situation wherewhat we could call ‘Third World elements’are to be discovered everywhere, includingwithin the United States and other corecountries. That is the general situation inSouth Korea regarding the Third World

discourse.As far as the Third World perspective as

I defined is concerned, it is not a way ofdividing the world into three portions but asa perspective on a single world, which is based on ordinary people rather than on thestrong and rich. I think it’s still valid andstill carries some weight in South Korea.And I am happy to be able to share thisperspective with more people in our region.

Now I will move on to national litera-

tures. I have been using the plural form ofthe word ‘national literatures’ not only because there are actually many nationalliteratures in the world, but very differentnotions of national literatures in differenthistorical and geographical contexts. InEast Asia, or at least in Korea, there aretwo different terms to translate the term‘national literature’. One is kookmin munhak

,and the other is minjok munhak

. ActuallyI think the former, that is kookmin munhak

, better fits the early examples of national

literatures in Europe. That is, a vernacularliterature that becomes the common prop-erty and inheritance of a national – ratherthan a merely local – community, althoughnot necessarily of a single nation-state. Forinstance, as an earlier example, we canthink of Italian literature since Dante, orEnglish literature since at least Chaucer.These deserved the name of kookmin munhak

even though, in the case of Italy, they didn’t

have a unified nation-state until the 19thcentury. But even in Europe, things aremore complicated. For instance, theGermans can be said to have a nationalliterature since Luther’s translation of theBible, or at least since Lessing and Goethe,

but this would better fit the term minjokmunhak

, because not only did they lack anation-state at the time but, even today, theGerman-speaking people or readers ofthese works of German national literaturedo not belong to a single state. So they havethis notion of Kulturnation

or ‘nation as acultural unit’ rather than a political unit. Soin the case of Germany, we can say the term

kookmin munhak

is not quite adequate, and

minjok munhak

perhaps more so. Or there isthe case of Irish literature, which in terms of

the language is a part of English literature, but because Ireland was an actual colony ofEngland or Britain, I think you can safelytalk about Ireland’s minjok munhak

, and asyou know, modern Irish literature had aconscious national literature or nationaldrama movement. I think this fits the ideaof minjok munhak

.On the other hand, when you come

to the United States, both Melville andWhitman advocated a ‘national literature’

for America. But this clearly means the liter-ature of the American nation, the AmericanRepublic, which should be spiritually inde-pendent from the mother country England.So this would fit the notion of kookminmunhak

.So there is this kind of inherent

complexity in the term national literature,which, on the one hand, the availability oftwo different terms kookmin munhak

and

minjok munhak

in the Chinese sphere of civi-lization helps to clarify, but on the other

hand makes it even more complicated, because the contents of the notion cannotquite be fully ordered and sorted out by justthese two terms alone.

In any case, when you come to EastAsia, I think modern Japanese literaturenaturally best conforms to the Europeanexamples of kookmin munhak

, whereas minjokmunhak

, if used at all, will carry stronglynegative connotations as the literature of



Notions of the Third World and national literatures

491

Japanese right wing and Japanese racism. InChina, I understand minjok munhak

is likelyto evoke literatures of ethnic minoritiesrather than national literature. So it willmean something quite different fromwhat the term ‘national literature’ in the

European languages originally intended.I don’t know how much more the term kook-min munhak

would be adequate to coverChinese literature as a whole or evenmodern Chinese literature. This is a fieldI know very little about, and I will not takethe risk of treading into it, I will just throwout this idea as a question.

In contrast to both Japan and China,Korea – both under Japanese colonial ruleand in the age of the division since 1945 –has a very specific rationale or reason

preferring minjok munhak

over kookminmunhak

. If, living under Japanese colonialregime as part of the nation-state of Japan,you advocated kookmin munhak

then youwould be surrendering your Koreannational identity and trying to be assimi-lated into the Japanese national culture.So this obviously wouldn’t do for manywriters of that period. They didn’t actuallyuse the term minjok munhak

widely duringthe Japanese period, but what they strove

for would best be expressed by the term

minjok munhak

rather than kookmin munhak

.After liberation from Japan, the country wasdivided into two parts, North and South,and advocating kookmin munhak

in this situ-ation would have been advocating theestablishment of the national literature ofone half of the nation, and that would have been helping to solidify the division, ratherthan trying to abolish it. So when we said inthe 1970s that we were trying to create

minjok munhak

rather than kookmin munhak

,

what we meant was even though the coun-try was divided, we wished to write for thewhole nation, North and South, and create aliterature that would be valid even afterreunification. So that was the idea ofnational literature, as the national literaturemovement was launched as a consciousmovement during the early 1970s, that is,under Park Chung-Hee’s military dictator-ship. As the dictatorship became harsher

and more repressive, and the confrontation between North and South became moresevere during the 1970s, minjok munhak

became sort of a rallying cry for the demo-cratic movement and for what we called the‘national culture movement’ of the 1970s.

This continued through the 1980s, eventhough, during the 1980s, the influence ofclassical Marxism-Leninism, as I said, became stronger; but even many Marxist-Leninists used national literature as a sort ofcover, when what they really meant was aclass literature. So there was a very vigorousdebate continuing through the 1980s.

But regarding this discourse of nationalliterature, too, there have been manychanges since the 1990s. For one thing, SouthKorea’s military dictatorship was finally

defeated in the nationwide popular uprisingof June 1987. Even though we didn’t havecomplete democracy as a result, it was ahuge step toward democracy, and theprocess of democratization that started in1987 hasn’t really stopped. In previous cases,like the April 1960 Student Revolution, itwas soon reversed by Park Chung-Hee’smilitary coup d’état

in 1961. Then, after Park’sdeath, there was a brief interval that wecalled the ‘Seoul Spring’ of 1980, but this

was also reversed by General Chun DooHwan’s coup d’état

in May of that year. Since1987, however, the process has continued,although with many ups and downs, and wemay have just entered a sort of downwardperiod since the recent return of the conser-vatives to power, but I don’t think this willreally change the big trend. And then ofcourse soon after the Soviet socialist bloccollapsed – Soviet socialism didn’t haveanything directly to do with national litera-ture but, as I said, it was a force for many

advocates of national literature, includingthose who used this as a cover for proletar-ian literature. But, more generally, there iswhat you may call the ‘socialist-nationalistimpulse’ in literature, which was valued by both Marxism and the doctrine of socialistrealism, and which has become muchweaker as a result of the end of Soviet social-ism. Meanwhile, the South Korean economycontinued to advance in the context of



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globalization. And then, also on the questionof reunification, I think people came to real-ize that there would be no quick reunifica-tion and that, when it came, it would comegradually, going through intermediatestages; and, until then, or even during the

intermediate stages, South Korea wouldretain its status as an independent politicalentity. As long as it was a nation-state ofsome kind, it did deserve some kind ofnational literature as kookmin munhak

, as wellas minjok munhak

. So I myself slightly revisedmy stance during the early 1990s, to say thatwhereas I continued to advocated minjokmunhak

as the literature of the entire Koreannation over kookmin munhak

as the literatureresting content with the state of division,I would now envisage our literature as a

minjok munhak

of the whole Korean nation,which at the same time served as kookminmunhak

of the South Korean society. So inthat respect too, the exclusive emphasis laidon minjok munhak

became weaker, while

minjok munhak

as a political slogan for thedemocratizing movement became outdatedwith the end of military dictatorship. To tellyou the truth, actually not many people inSouth Korea use the term minjok munhak

nowadays, and for the reasons I’ve

explained and for others I will say moreabout soon, I myself feel that it isn’t veryproductive to keep harping on about theterm national literature. The important thingis to preserve the perspective and the senseof the problematic inherent in the notions of both the Third World and national literature.

Now I will move on to Korean literatureand the task of overcoming what I call thedivision system in Korea. The persistence ofKorea’s division after German unificationand the end of East–West Cold War drew

attention to the ‘systematic’ nature of thisdivision, that is, not a simple confrontation between two division states or two oppos-ing ideologies, but more importantly apeninsula-wide system in which ordinarypeople of both North and South areexploited by vested interest groups on bothsides plus those in the larger world-system,particularly of the hegemonic power ofthat system, namely the United States. So

overcoming the division system involvesmore than the nationalistic agenda of recov-ering lost national unity; we have to addressthe many global, regional, peninsular,domestic South Korean, and also the localdimensions of the division system.

South Korea’s concept of nationalliterature was never a simply nationalisticliterature, that is, the national literaturemovement was a kind

of national movement but not just a national

istic

movement orproject. For instance, it aimed to be literatureof the ordinary people and for the ordinarypeople; that is, not celebrating an abstractnotion of the people or the nation butaddressing the actual needs of the prepon-derant majority of the members of theKorean nation. And our concern for reunifi-

cation also arose from this ground, that is, notas an abstract call for ‘one state for eachnation’, but because the actual interests andneeds of the majority of the people formingthe Korean nation were being threatened by the division system and we needed toovercome it for people to become freer, tolive a more democratic, more egalitarian andmore environment-friendly life. So thenational literature movement was never asimply nationalistic project from the start,

but in the new situation of more recent years,it had to expand and revise itself to includeother specific agendas. For instance, it had tocarry on a critical engagement with national-ism, something it had been doing all along, but this task became more urgent as the nega-tive features of South Korean nationalismcombined with a kind of sub-imperialism ofthe South Korean state became more salientover the years. Also, we had to pay more seri-ous attention to such global-local, or as theysay the ‘glocal’, issues of ecology, gender,

minority rights, etc, in order to work towarda better society than what we have under thecurrent division system. That is, the aim ofovercoming the division system does notsignify national unity regardless of content;what we need is the kind of reunification thatwould actually overcome the divisionsystem and give us a better system than whatwe have now. For this project, you cannotaim at merely reunifying the national




493

territory or integrating the two regimes intoone; you have to prepare and work for a better society in all these areas where youneed to work for a better life, and you haveto address these issues of ecology, minorityrights, gender and so on. In addition, litera-

ture has to place greater emphasis on EastAsian regional solidarity.

For this widened perspective and theexpanded agendas, the term ‘national litera-ture’ becomes somewhat confining. Incertain contexts, it works fine, but in othercontexts it’s rather confusing, or it divertsattention from the necessary agendas, yetI think even though it is more limited, thereis still a certain usefulness of the nationalliterature discourse. For one thing, eventhough we have criticized nationalism as an

ideology, we do need nationalistic energiesof the people, which are indispensable in,say, opposing the US-imposed globalism orSouth Korea’s own division ideologies.National literature is also useful as a meet-ing ground for writers of the two Koreas.Now North Korean society has become verystrongly nationalistic in recent decades, andNorth Korean writers and political leadersstrongly embrace the notion of nationalliterature. Of course their concept is much

simpler than what I have tried to set forthhere; they think of minjok munhak

as litera-ture working for national reunification inopposition to American imperialism, SouthKorean reactionaries, and so on. In any case,

minjok munhak

is an absolutely necessaryground when you try to have a dialoguewith North Korean writers, so we have tostart from there, and then go on to revise, ifwe can, the far too simplistic notions thatour North Korean colleagues have ofnational literature.

Thirdly, I would say, even for the sakeof world literature, the notion of nationalliteratures is not quite out of date. Ofcourse in this case, you have to have notonly national literatures but various localliteratures as well to maintain the culturaldiversity of the world and to resist theuniformity under the cover of the speciousdiversity of multiculturalism that is beingpromoted by the global consumerist

culture. So there, too, is still some effective-ness for the term or discourse of nationalliterature.

Finally, I would like to say a few wordsconcerning the possible relevance of SouthKorea’s literary project to other East Asian

writers. Regarding Japan, I think if we takeaway the term minjok munhak

, which is abso-lutely impossible in the Japanese context,the kind of project that the Korean nationalliterature movement has promoted hasmany contributions to make in helping the Japanese have a richer and healthier litera-ture. I don’t want to denigrate the impres-sive achievements that Japanese writershave made over the past 100 years andmore; they have a very impressive corpus ofmodern Japanese literature. But, increas-

ingly, I think Japanese literature is, on theone hand, engulfed by the consumeristglobal culture, and on the other hand sort ofisolating itself in small enclaves of elitistproductions. For instance, poetry in contem-porary Japan is read by very few people,whereas in South Korea, there are a numberof poets who sell tens of thousands of copiesof their collection and many can usuallysell two to three thousand copies. Of coursethe number of volumes sold is not an

adequate measure of the vitality of litera-ture, but you can tell something of the atmo-sphere through these statistics. So I wouldsay that if the notion of minjok munhak

thatwe have tried to define in our particularcontext can be translated into other terms,indicating Japanese writers’ responsibilityto address their own national problems,questions of their national identity, nationalheritages, and their independence fromAmerican hegemony and global consumer-ist culture and so on, I think this could serve

as a very healthy antidote to the currenttrends of Japanese literature.

Now regarding China, I have far lessto say, even less than about Japanese litera-ture. But when my book in Chinese waspublished in 1998 and I went to Beijing tomeet some Chinese writers and intellectuals,I was very gratified and impressed by thevery quick understanding that they showedto the kind of questions that I had been



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Paik Nak-chung

raising, even though the term minjok munhak

itself was not relevant to their ideas. Theyseemed to have the same problems of coun-tering the global influence or the invasionof global post-modern culture. They wereconcerned about freedom of expression but

not necessarily surrendering to liberal ideol-ogies, and the problem of what to do withthe socialist traditions, and so on. Chineseliterature is, in a way, too large and complexto even to call it kookmin munhak

. Forinstance, the literature of Chinese languageis more than the national literature of China.It is a delicate task of navigating throughthis complex of Chinese language literatureand the literature of the Chinese nation, andalso the many minority ethnic literatureswithin China. These problems are not

commensurable with what we face in Korea, but I think some useful lessons could bedrawn if we made comparative studies ofthe two cases.

As for Taiwan, I know even less and ammore afraid of saying anything foolish. ButI think South Korea and Taiwan do have ashared sense of opposition to dictatorship,the experience of fighting dictatorship, andconcerns about preserving our culturalidentities or whatever we call it from the

uniformalizing influence of global consum-erist culture. I don’t know how you wouldexactly situate Taiwanese literature in termsof the place you would give Taiwanese liter-ature within the larger Chinese languageliterature of the Chinese-speaking commu-nity. And you have the even more politi-cally sensitive task of placing it in relationwith the literature of PRC. I suspect therewould be extreme positions ranging fromthinking of Taiwanese literature as acompletely independent national literature,

to the other extreme of seeing it as simply apart of Chinese literature of the wholeChina, including China and Taiwan. Thereshould probably be some middle ground between these two extremes. In addition, inTaiwan, you will have the same problem aswe do in South Korea, of placing our litera-ture within the East Asian context: what rolewould we like to assume in promoting arich, region-wide culture consisting of many

national literatures of many languages,many nation-states and many entities,which are not quite fully nation-states?

As I indicated at the start, I will nowadd a remark on globalization. I will justgive a rough idea. I suspect that neo-liberal

globalization is not quite the end state of thecapitalist world-economy. Right after thecollapse of the socialist bloc, many peoplethought this would really be a floweringperiod of capitalism and neo-liberal global-ization that represented ‘the end of history’according to Francis Fukuyama (1992), forinstance, but it really hasn’t turned out thatway, and it’s the government of the UnitedStates that has done as much as anybody todestroy this scheme. I mean, it weakenedand put into disarray, though not quite

destroyed, many of the institutions of neo-liberal globalization, like the WTO, IMF,World Bank and so on. For instance, inSouth Korea, our main concern today isabout the issue of the bilateral Free TradeAgreement with the United States, whichhas been signed but not yet ratified, andmany people are trying to at least preventany rash ratification of this in many waysvery dangerous agreement. So the mainissue has become this bilateral agreement,

and WTO agreements seem quite benignin comparison and almost forgotten inpeople’s minds. There are also differentkinds of bilateral relations, like the Ameri-can invasion of Iraq, which took the form ofa so-called coalition of the willing, but it ismore or less a unilateral military action onthe part of the United States. So I think theneo-liberal globalization has reached certainlimits, and I don’t think any new adminis-tration in the United States could quiterepair all the damage that has been done. So

maybe this is the time for the ordinarypeople of the world to carry on the impulseof the globalization but in a completelydifferent manner: what we usually call‘globalization from below’, based on local,national, regional, and worldwide popularsolidarities. And I think in this process, thepeople-oriented global perspective of the so-called Third World or national literaturediscourses need to be preserved and further




495

developed whether or not we choose toadopt the particular term ‘The Third World’or ‘national literature’.

Acknowledgements

This essay is based on a presentation deliv-ered at the College of Humanities and SocialSciences, National Tsing Hua University,Taiwan, on 22 May 2008.

References

Fukuyama, Francis (1992)

The End of History and theLast Man,

New York: Free Press.

Special terms

Kim Chi-Hakookmin munhak

minjok munhak

Author’s biography

Paik Nak-chung is Professor Emeritus of English atSeoul National University, and the registered editorof The Changbi Quarterly

.

Contact address:

Department of English Languageand Literature, Seoul National University, 599Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu Seoul, 151-745, SouthKorea.



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