Listening to Korea: audible prayers, boat songs, and the aural possibilities of the US missionary archive

This chapter examines a range of sonic descriptions in the writings of North American Protestant missionaries in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Korea. These descriptions in the missionary archive point to listening practices firmly embedded in Western imperial and North American evangelical epistemologies. Instances of missionaries’ listening to the “natives” reveal two different conceptualizations of Koreans’ vocal practice. Many missionaries conceptualized it as an object of conversion and linked authentic Christian faith to the supposed universality of North American culture. Other missionaries conceptualized it as an object of folkloristic analysis, projecting essentialist ideas about Korean alterity to what they heard. This chapter argues that both forms of listening, despite their oppositional outlooks, were conditioned by an ingrained practice of listening that assumed Korean vocalization as an audible site of interiority.