Authorship, co-production, plagiarism: Issues of origin and provenance in the Korean Studies community

The long controversy and struggle over Charles Armstrong’s Tyranny of the Weak may have, for the Korean Studies community felt uniquely transgressive and offensive, but the malfeasance and academic corruption of the episode is not by far the only instance of productive difficulty in the recent history of the academic field. This paper not only attempts to think through questions of authenticity and intellectual ownership in Korean Studies’ difficulties with the writer formerly known as Professor Charles Armstrong, but also to explore other moments of complexity, both historical and contemporary, in the discipline. These include questions and problems surrounding co-production and practices of shared and creative authorship in many recent North Korean defector/refugee narratives, alternative views of truth telling and notions of “truthyness” familiar in a world of #fakenews and post-truth. The paper seeks a longer, deeper historical frame for considering Korean Studies “wicked” problems of authorship, touching on complicated processes of misinformation, disinformation and re-publication from the Cold War, past visions of political and ideological realities weaponized by security agencies and actors whose agendas and ambitions have not always entirely been clear. Ultimately beyond concrete notions of truth and objectivity, the paper asks whether Korean Studies should be concerned with the origin stories and provenance of text as much as with source and citation.