Exhuming the Collaborator

Abstract This article examines how post-1945 historiographic writings from France and Korea figure the anti-national “collaborator.” The transnational figuration and circulation of the collaborator reinforce its unique, constitutive role within networked nationalist formations. This article sketches a dialectics of the collaborator as a phenomenon that accounts for both the othering and the incorporation of this anti-national figure into contemporary nation-foundation narratives. Key theorizations from Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry Rousso, Im Chong-guk, and others have transformed collaboration as a postwar problem into the collaborator, a figure-object onto which nationalist anxieties are inscribed across different political affiliations. Tracing eras of remembrance, forgetting, and obsession, this article demonstrates that rhetorical figurations shape collective, cultural perceptions of who collaborators are and what they do for the contemporary nation.