Colonial Landscapes: Nostalgia and Imperial Memory in Postcolonial Japanese and South Korean Short Fiction

• In Event: Colonial legacies and Cold War Trajectories: Contact Zones and Boundaries in Japanese and Korean Literature

Abstract

The experience of colonialism and war shaped the postcolonial literary landscapes of South Korea and Japan in often remarkably similar ways and gave rise to narratives of memory marked by a profound feeling of powerlessness. This paper explores representations of the Korean colonial landscape in Japanese and South Korean short fiction written between the end of the Korean War in 1953 and the late 1960s. It will investigate how imperialism and its aftermath are constructed as a collective trauma and how identities in both countries are narrated in relation to the respective national Other.
On both sides, we find fiction that laments how an idyllic rural Korean landscape representing a seemingly originary ethno-national Korean identity is disrupted by the intrusion of a mostly faceless Japanese imperial power. While the mode of depicting the colonial Korean landscape differs in South Korean and Japanese short fiction, overall, this literature challenges the simplistic perpetrator-victim binary that is prevalent in political debates. Instead, it shows the instability of colonial and postcolonial discourse as it reveals the impotence on both sides of the power divide. By exploring the commonalities and rifts between the two collective narratives, the paper highlights how the nostalgic representation of colonial Korea produces a particular kind of memory marked by mutual rejection and longing.
At the same time, the paper argues that this mode of depiction also mirrors the East Asian position within the Cold War world system in the pivotal years before and after the Japan-ROK normalization treaty.

Author

• Nadeschda Bachem, SOAS, University of London