In this article, I depart from the typical discussion of the Korean sociocultural concept of han as a collective feeling of unresolved resentment, pain, grief, and anger that runs in the blood of all Koreans. Scholars, artists, writers, and critics frequently characterize han as ‘‘the Korean ethos’’ and the soul of Korean art, literature, and film. It is said to be unique to Koreans and incomprehensible to Westerners. I argue, however, that its contemporary biologistic-oriented meaning emerged first during the Japanese colonial period as a colonial stereotype, and that tracing the afterlife of han gives us a postcolonial understanding of its deployment in culture. I examine how han originated under the contradictions of coloniality, how it evolved from a colonial construct to its adoption into Korean ethnonationalism, and how it travels into a completely new context through the Korean diaspora. Rather than dismissing han as nothing more than a social construct, I instead define han as an affect that encapsulates the grief of historical memory—the memory of past collective trauma—and that renders itself racialized/ethnicized and attached to nation.

中文翻译：

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朝鲜汉族与《悲伤之美》的后殖民时代

在这篇文章中，我与韩国社会文化概念的典型讨论不同，“汉”是一种流淌在所有韩国人血液中的未解决的怨恨、痛苦、悲伤和愤怒的集体感觉。学者、艺术家、作家和评论家经常将 han 描述为“韩国精神”和韩国艺术、文学和电影的灵魂。据说这是韩国人独有的，西方人无法理解的。然而，我认为，它的当代生物学导向意义首先在日本殖民时期作为一种殖民刻板印象出现，追溯汉人的来世使我们对其在文化中的部署有了后殖民理解。我研究了汉族是如何在殖民主义的矛盾下起源的，它是如何从殖民建构演变为韩国民族主义的，以及它如何通过韩国侨民进入一个全新的环境。与其将 han 视为一种社会建构，我倒不如将 han 定义为一种情感，它包含了历史记忆的悲痛——过去集体创伤的记忆——并使自己种族化/种族化并依附于国家。