Transnational Anticolonialism in 1930s Korean and Taiwanese Literature

• In Event: Trans/National Literary Practices in Colonized Korea and Taiwan

Abstract

This paper examines how colonized Korean and Taiwanese writers dramatized each other’s history, as opposed to national history, in semicolonized Shanghai and occupied Manchuria. The paper argues that the spaces outside their native lands—Shanghai and Manchuria—prompted the colonized authors to seek anticolonialism that disentangled itself from nationalist ideas and sensibilities.

As the examples of transnational anticolonialism, I analyze the Korean playwright, Niu Bu’s drama_Taiwan_(1930) and the Taiwanese writer, Zhong Lihe’s novel_The City’s Dusk_(1939). The Korean writer dramatized the Bamboo Mountain Incident (1928), the real historical event that Japan confiscated Taiwanese peasants’ bamboo fields. _Taiwan__was the first literature that was based on this event. The Korean author had no relations, direct or indirect, to Taiwan, which he had not even visited for his whole lifetime. In Shanghai, Niu Bu encountered materials on the Bamboo Mountain Incident, and authored __Taiwan__ in Chinese with the assistance of the Korean-Chinese actor Jin Yan. The play disclosed how the Japanese colonial government destroyed Taiwanese peasants’ lives, which include peasants’ suicide, collapse of family, and inner schism within Taiwanese. Zhong’s __The City’s Dusk__portrays a Taiwanese youth’s friendship with two Korean men, whom he met at Automotive Academy in Manchuria. In comparison to _Taiwan_, _The City’s Dusk_ focuses more on anti-traditionalism, critiquing arranged underage marriage, patriarchal family, and gender inequality. However, the novel does ultimately evoke sympathy for Korea by engaging with people’s abject lives in their motherland, which enforced the Koreans to migrate to Manchuria.

Author

• Inhye Han, University of California, San Diego