Representing U.S.-Korea Relations, 1871-1923

This dissertation shows the United States’ cultural imaginings of Korea from 1871 to 1923. The representations that the United States developed of Korea had consequences for how the two countries engaged with each other politically. From the 1870s until 1882 the United States media represented Korea and Koreans as “savages” and “barbaric,” justifying the United States’ violent actions in Korea during the Battle of Kanghwa (1871). After the Shufeldt Treaty was signed and until the turn of the twentieth century, the United States represented Korea as a country with the potential for development and growth in commercial relations. However, in 1905, Korea became a protectorate of Japan through the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth. In the aftermath, the United States’ media represented Korea as a state requiring tutelage from a stronger nation. Japan quickly annexed Korea to become its colony by 1910. In the years that followed, the United States’ public came to forget its prior history of relations with an independent Korea. I argue that while the United States public and government had viewed Korea as backwards and non-sovereign from the beginning of its formal relations, the idea of Korea as a “hermit kingdom” was not fixed from the start. It developed in the context of complex geopolitics and U.S. imperial ambitions. This idea of the “hermit kingdom” led to an active forgetting of a period in U.S.-Korea relations when Korea was an independent state. Without considering how the United States first created a representation of a “hermit” Korea in the nineteenth century, we cannot fully grapple with the history of sovereignty in Korea, the course of U.S.-Korean relations in the mid-twentieth century, or the long history of U.S. projections of power in East Asia.