"L’identità nazionale post-coloniale in Corea del Sud"

National identity is a cultural, historical, political and economic concept that every Korean citizen claims to share. The article traces diachronically the sense of traditional ethnic identity and the birth of national-ethnic identity, in the Western sense, which developed in the late nineteenth century. The former was a conservative nationalism, focused on preserving tradition, and would be superceded from the colonial period onward by a progressive nationalism aspiring to modernization and independence. The article highlights the historical facts and the subtle semantic change in the concept of national identity and its multiple revisions, demonstrating that Korea’s identity in general, and its national identity in particular, rather than remaining static, has undergone a gradual development. The article examines, in the context of cultural policy, the national curricula and teachers’ textbooks, which assign to teachers the task of forming the moral-ethical character of future generations, especially where revisions have been imposed by the central government. The second part of the article analyzes the construction of national identity in the cultural politics of decolonization, where the concept of independence has taken on a specific meaning in Korea’s post-colonial politics. It is a concept of identity that underwent further transformations during other historical phases, from the division of Korea (since 1945), the 1950-1953 war, the country’s rapid modernization and the indiscriminate influx of Western culture, and since the 1990s, the sense of national-ethnic identity associated with the development of ICT (Information and communications technology) and cultural industries. The article then carries out an in-depth analysis of the “paradoxical” concept of nationalism in the post-colonial period, in the form of a subliminal ‘colonizing [of] the Mind’.

L’identità nazionale è un concetto culturale, storico, politico ed economico che ogni cittadino coreano sostiene di condividere. Ciò che rafforza la percezione di questa identità è la nozione di in-group che plasma le relazioni tra l’identità del sé con il mondo esterno. L’aspetto culturale è alla base dell’identità nazionale in Corea, una caratteristica che molti studiosi hanno osservato per il forte legame di appartenenza che si instaura tra i membri dell’in-group, ad esempio nei confronti del proprio Paese, in contrasto con il sentimento che questi provano verso i membri appartenenti ad out-group , e per esteso, ad esempio, nei confronti di Paesi stranieri. Dato che i concetti di in-group e out-group sono diffusi tra gli antropologi e sociologi per analizzare le società individualiste in contrasto con quelle collettiviste, in questo articolo essi costituiscono una chiave di lettura essenziale per comprendere la stretta relazione, quasi di equivalenza, che i coreani riconoscono tra l’identità nazionale e quella etnica.