The storytellers of Korean nationalism: Book Review of David Fields, Foreign Friends: Syngman Rhee, American Exceptionalism and the Division of Korea

• Main Author: NGOEI, Wen-Qing (WEI Wenqing)
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2021
• Subjects: Korean War; American Exceptionalism; International and Area Studies; Political Science
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3218
• Institution: Singapore Management University

As author David Fields notes in Foreign Friends, the received wisdom about the division of South Korea is that American “men with little knowledge of Korea” undertook at the close of the Pacific War to split the Korean peninsula along the 38th parallel, with the United States occupying the south and the USSR the north. This “wholly American action” supposedly gave no consideration to Korean aspirations (169). But this received wisdom is inaccurate, Fields argues, because the histories of Korean nationalism and the United States were intimately intertwined well before the Pacific War.