Bruce Cumings (1943-) is an American academic and author. He is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in History and the chair of the history department at the University of Chicago. He specializes in modern Korean history and contemporary international relations in East Asia.
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Bruce Cumings was born in Rochester, New York on 5 September 1943.
In his youth, Cumings was a Peace Corps volunteer in South Korea for less than a year before going to Columbia University in 1968.[1] He joined the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars at Columbia after Mark Selden formed a chapter there,[2] and published extensively in its journal, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. His father conducted research for the Central Intelligence Agency. He is married to Meredith Jung-En Woo the Dean of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia. Together they have two teenage sons; additionally, Dr. Cumings has a daughter from his first marriage.
His research focus is on 20th century international history, United States and East Asia relations, East Asian political economy, modern Korean history, and American foreign relations. He is interested in the "multiplicity of ways that conceptions, metaphors and discourses are related to political economy and material forms of production", and to relations between "East and West".[3]
In summarizing the culpability of various actors for the tragedy of the Korean War Cumings writes that:
| “ | The Korean War did not begin on June 25, 1950, much special pleading and argument to the contrary. If it did not begin then, Kim II Sung could not have "started" it then, either, but only at some earlier point. As we search backward for that point, we slowly grope toward the truth that civil wars do not start: they come. They originate in multiple causes, with blame enough to go around for everyone- and blame enough to include Americans who thoughtlessly divided Korea and then reestablished the colonial government machinery and the Koreans who served it. How many Koreans might still be alive had not that happened? Blame enough to include a Soviet Union likewise unconcerned with Korea's ancient integrity and determined to "build socialism" whether Koreans wanted their kind of system or not. How many Koreans might still be alive had that not happened? And then, as we peer inside Korea to inquire about Korean actions that might have avoided national division and fratricidal conflict, we get a long list indeed.[4] | ” |
He is presently completing a book entitled Industrial Behemoth: The Northeast Asian Political Economy in the 20th Century, which seeks to understand the industrialization of Japan, both Koreas, Taiwan, and parts of China, and the ways that scholars and political leaders have viewed that development.[5]
Cumings writes in his book North Korea: The Hermit Kingdom, "I have no sympathy for the North, which is the author of most of its own troubles," but alludes to the "significant responsibility that all Americans share for the garrison state that emerged on the ashes of our truly terrible destruction of the North half a century ago."
In May 2007, Cumings was the first recipient of the Kim Dae Jung Academic Award for Outstanding Achievements and Scholarly Contributions to Democracy, Human Rights and Peace granted by South Korea. The award is named in honor of Nobel Peace Prize winner and former President of South Korea Kim Dae Jung. The award recognizes Cumings for his "outstanding scholarship, and engaged public activity regarding human rights and democratization during the decades of dictatorship in Korea, and after the dictatorship ended in 1987." Around the time when he received his award Cumings met President Kim at his home in Seoul. "They discussed the North Korean nuclear program, the Korean-American relationship, and what can be done to improve Korean attitudes toward the United States."[6]
Professor Cumings has been a frequent contributor to the New Left Review. His articles include "The Last Hermit", "The Korean Crisis and the End of ‘Late’ Development", and "The Abortive Abertura: South Korea in the Light of Latin American Experience", and he also written several reviews.[7][8] In 2003 Cumings alleged that the United States had "occupied" South Korea for 58 years and disputed the contention that North Korea had cheated on the October 1994 Agreed Framework.[9]
At the University of Chicago, Cumings "won the John King Fairbank Book Award of the American Historical Association, and the second volume of this study won the Quincy Wright Book Award of the International Studies Association."[10]
Socialist Review has also praised Cumings' work in "A Different Hymn Sheet" by saying: "This is a good read for anyone looking for an introduction to this member of 'the axis of evil', especially given the lack of books on the subject which aren't hysterical denunciations from the US right or hymns of praise from Stalinists."[11]
Cumings has been described as "the left's leading scholar of Korean history"[12] and Paul Hollander, amongst others, has argued that Cumings has a pro-North Korea bias. Hollander cites Cumings' discussion of the North Korean prison system, noting that "in a triumph of selective perception, he manages to interpret the most damning indictment of the North Korean gulag available--The Aquariums of Pyongyang, by Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot--as providing support for his views of the system. As he sees it, the book is 'interesting and believable' because it is not the 'ghastly tale of totalitarian repression that its original publishers ... meant it to be.' But it is precisely and resoundingly that, as any reader without a soft spot for North Korean tyranny would readily discover. Cumings writes that "conditions were primitive and beatings were frequent [in the camp described in that book] but the inmates also were able to improvise much of their upkeep on their own ... small animals could surreptitiously be caught and cooked." He delicately refrains from mentioning that these small animals were mostly rats, and a regular part of the narrator's diet. That book makes abundantly clear that hunger and malnutrition were endemic; inmates stealing food or trying to escape were executed. Cumings also fails to mention these public executions the inmates were obliged to attend, stressing instead that families were commendably kept together and that "death from starvation was rare." In any event, he suggests, these deprivations are put into the proper perspective by our "longstanding, never-ending gulag full of black men in our prisons"--which should disqualify us from "pointing a finger."[13]
Historian Allan Millett has argued that Cumings' "eagerness to cast American officials and policy in the worst possible light, however, often leads him to confuse chronological cause and effect and to leap to judgments that cannot be supported by the documentation he cites or ignores."[14]
Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, professor of North Korean literature B.R. Myers lambasted Cumings arguing that, in North Korea: Another Country, "Cumings likens North Korea to Thomas More's Utopia, and this time the wrongheadedness seems downright willful; it's as if he were so tired of being made to look silly by forces beyond his control that he decided to do the job himself".[15]
Although Cumings has been described as a "revisionist" by Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies scholar Kathryn Weathersby,[16] U of Georgia historian William W. Stueck ,[17] New York Times book critic Dwight Garner,[18] Francis Marion historian Scott Kaufman,[19] former Bradley historian Lester H. Bradley,[20] Cal State history department chair James Matray,[21] and Douglas Macdonald of the Strategic Studies Institute,[22] Cumings himself has rejected the label.[23]
Articles (selected)