“Cartography and Contraband Religion in Chosŏn Korea: Andreas Kim Taegŏn (1821-1846) and his Map of Korea“
Wednesday, September 20, 2023
10:00 A.M – 11:30 A.M. EDT
Zoom Event
About the Event
Andreas Kim Taegŏn is viewed in the Korean collective memory as the first indigenous Catholic priest and a martyr for his faith. This common perception, however, conceals a much more complex story, that of Kim Taegŏn’s life trajectory as go-between and religious broker. This is evidenced among other things by the Map of Korea (Carta Coreæ) that he drew in 1845. This presentation investigates the hybrid nature of this map, which is neither fully Asian nor fully Western, and seeks to go beyond the question of adopting or rejecting modern European cartography at the expense of traditional Korean cartography. Dr. Roux will explore the making of a clandestine missionary cartography through the reappropriation of Korean official knowledge, and also demonstrate how go-betweens who mastered linguistic and cultural codes shaped the history of Catholicism beyond a mere religious contribution. In doing so, this presentation shows how the Map of Korea sheds light on both European adaptations of Asian maps and the historical evolution of Korean cartography in the late Chosŏn period (1392-1897). It also demonstrates that the supposed original map discovered in the French National Library in 2019 is certainly nothing more than a late and bad copy of the real original map.
Speaker
Pierre-Emmanuel Roux is an associate professor of East Asian history at Université Paris Cité. He is interested in the circulation of legal and religious knowledge in East Asia from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. He is the author of three monographs in French: La Croix, la baleine et le canon: La France face à la Corée au milieu du XIXe siècle [The Cross, the Whale, and the Cannon: French Policy towards Korea in the Mid Nineteenth Century] (Cerf, 2012), Les Enfers vivants ou La tragédie illustrée des coolies chinois à Cuba et au Pérou [The Living Hells or The Illustrated Tragedy of Chinese Coolies in Cuba and Peru] (Hémisphères, 2018), and Au tribunal du repentir : La proscription du catholicisme en Chine (1724-1860) [At the Tribunal of Repentance: The Prohibition of Catholicism in China, 1724-1860] (CNRS Editions, 2023). He also serves as the Chief Editor of the French scholarly journal Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident. He is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Andreas Kim Taegŏn (1821-1846): The Clandestine Life and Heroic Afterlife of the First Korean Catholic Priest.
Moderator
Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University. She is Founding Director of the GW Institute for Korean Studies (2017-Present) and Founding Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center (2018-Present). She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies. She specializes in gender, sexuality, law, emotions, and affect in Korean history. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2016), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Criminalization of Intimacy: Adultery Law and the Making of Monogamous Marriage in Korea. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.
