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

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

In recent years, a new comparative literature has emerged that studies East Asian literature intra-regionally in terms of common histories, contents and styles, instead of confining itself to strict national borders. This panel locates literature from Japan and the two Koreas within this framework of an East Asian comparative literature and seeks to examine discursive continuities and breaks from the colonial past in addition to tracing the emergence of new discourses from 1945 to the 1960s. In particular, it will shed light on the various processes of memory and collective identity formation in relation to the respective national Others in the literature of the three countries as they find themselves the battleground of the Cold War clash of ideological systems.
In detail, Berthelier looks at the post-liberation popular culture movement in North Korea and examines how the identities of workers and peasants were constructed by the writers who claimed to speak for them. Meanwhile, Wada examines the logic of vengeance as socialist practice formed during the Korean War in the North Korean literature, connecting it with the discursive legacy of proletarian literature from the colonial period. Kim argues that Japanese and South Koreans authors writing within the postcolonial-Cold War system used guilt as an acceptable way to make themselves subjects who bear responsibility. Finally, Bachem explores the representation of colonial Korea in South Korean and Japanese short fiction and shows how a nostalgic view on the Korean landscape serves to perpetuate postcolonial perceptions of ethnonational identity in both countries.

Area of Study

• Northeast Asia

Session Organizer

• Yoshihiro Wada, Yonsei University

Chair

• Christina Yi, University of British Columbia

Individual Presentations

• The Intellectual and His People: Mass Culture and Class Identities in Post-liberation North Korea - Benoit Berthelier, Yonsei University

• Expressing Vengeance and Being Humane in 1950s North Korean literature - Yoshihiro Wada, Yonsei University

• Becoming a Responsible Subject: Responsibility and Guilt in South Korean and Japanese Post-War - JinGyu Kim, Seoul National University

• Colonial Landscapes: Nostalgia and Imperial Memory in Postcolonial Japanese and South Korean Short Fiction - Nadeschda Bachem, SOAS, University of London