Who Are ‘We’? The Dynamics of Consent and Coercion in Yi Mun-gu’s Our Neighbourhood

Abstract

This chapter addresses the question of who ‘we’ are, as it is presented in the Korean novelist Yi Mun-gu’s controversial short story collection Our Neighbourhood (1981), which concerns life in a small farming village in Korea in the 1970s.¹ The term woori, which is the grammatical collective subject ‘we’ in Korean, entails a homogeneity with which its members identify. Because they are not ‘others’ to each other, this ‘we’ calls for an exceptional fraternity that forces its constituents to accommodate each other. This requirement, or expectation, should be seen as a latent feature of the customary practice of calling the group to which one belongs ‘we’. From the modern period onwards, Korean peasants have come to be thought of as the most ‘we-like’ of the ‘we’. This characterization is grounded in the idea that the peasants, who replenish the soil with their sweat, retained what was left of the traditional community. Of course, it would be very difficult to verify the true ‘we’ of the peasants portrayed in this collection of short stories; rather, these stories call into question just who belongs to the ‘we’ in ‘our neighbourhood’.