Voice from the North: Resurrecting Regional Identity through the Life and Work of Yi Sihang (1672–1736) by Sun Joo Kim (review)

Sun Joo Kim has given us another of her fine studies of the “northern regions” of Korea during the late Chosŏn period long before it could be labeled “North Korea.” Her first book, Marginality and Subversion in Korea: The Hong Kyŏngnae Rebellion of 1812 (University of Washington, 2007), used the uprising of common laborers as a way to study the society and economy of the area. In that work, Kim, who is the Harvard-Yenching Professor of Korean History at Harvard, went beyond the assumptions of class struggle and examined the shifting relationships between local elites and commoners, who both had grievances aplenty against the royal government in Seoul. A major theme running throughout her work is the idea that discrimination against northern people, and the regional resentment that follows from it, has a long history. Without referring to the latter-day variants of this in the Cold War division of Korea, she shows us that Chosŏn-era marginalizing of the northern region and its people surely underlies some of the friction and hostility that continues to this day.

In Kim’s words, “In Chosŏn Korea, men from the northern provinces of P’yŏngan, Hamgyŏng, and Hwanghae were discriminated against in their bureaucratic careers and socially deprecated for their allegedly non-Confucian cultural traits” (p. 3). Thus, Voice from the North is about a Chosŏn Dynasty nobleman from this area, Yi Sihang, who was not especially famous or exceptional. His life was full of the trappings of yangban noble status, but he nevertheless faced limits because of his place of origin. The book is a microhistorical study of politics and society in Chosŏn as experienced by one man and his associates. For it is not just that he was from P’yŏngan Province in the North. In his era, power in Seoul was in the hands of small factions of contending officials, most of them from southern provinces, who fought over access to the king, appointments to office, moral and philosophical issues, and much else. The infighting was tough enough for southerners. It was that much harder for a northerner to find a perch.

To tell the story, author Kim draws on Yi Sihang’s collected works (munjip) consisting of essays, poems, anecdotes, and biographical material. Though there is no diary as such, Kim is able to give the munjip a close enough reading to spin out details of Yi Sihang’s life and times, including much information about his associates. Other sources include court records for periods in which Yi Sihang was a central government official, for he was one of the relatively few northerners who held high office in Seoul to that point. This is enough to establish his perspective on the turbulent times surrounding the succession of King Yŏngjo (r. 1724–76), a time of intense jockeying among factions struggling for power in a ruling class that had too few positions for too many aspirants. The material also illuminates some of the cultural changes that were under way a century after the Imjin War and Manchu Invasions, and the determined practices of yangban elite families to hold onto their exclusive privileges at the top of Korean society. It became their business to fend off attempts by minor clans and branches to claim membership in their descent groups, via an ever-tighter emphasis on Confucian family ritual and genealogical documentation.

Yi Sihang was born at a point in the Chosŏn period when northerners were gradually gaining limited acceptance as participants in the drama of national politics. This was after the mid-dynasty wars had greatly increased contact between the capital and the northwest. Familiarity with the north bred possibilities at court for...