Colonizing Language (eBook)

Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea

Christina Yi (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018
Columbia University Press (Verlag)
978-0-231-54536-5 (ISBN)

Infos

Christina Yi investigates linguistic nationalism in the formation of literary canons through an examination of Japanese-language cultural production by Korean and Japanese writers from the 1930s through the 1950s. She challenges conventional understandings of national literature by showing how Japanese language ideology shaped colonial histories.

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With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, Japan embarked on a policy of territorial expansion that would claim Taiwan and Korea, among others. Assimilation policies led to a significant body of literature written in Japanese by colonial writers by the 1930s. After its unconditional surrender in 1945, Japan abruptly receded to a nation-state, establishing its present-day borders. Following Korea's liberation, Korean was labeled the national language of the Korean people, and Japanese-language texts were purged from the Korean literary canon. At the same time, these texts were also excluded from the Japanese literary canon, which was reconfigured along national, rather than imperial, borders.In Colonizing Language, Christina Yi investigates how linguistic nationalism and national identity intersect in the formation of modern literary canons through an examination of Japanese-language cultural production by Korean and Japanese writers from the 1930s through the 1950s, analyzing how key texts were produced, received, and circulated during the rise and fall of the Japanese empire. She considers a range of Japanese-language writings by Korean colonial subjects published in the 1930s and early 1940s and then traces how postwar reconstructions of ethnolinguistic nationality contributed to the creation of new literary canons in Japan and Korea, with a particular focus on writers from the Korean diasporic community in Japan. Drawing upon fiction, essays, film, literary criticism, and more, Yi challenges conventional understandings of national literature by showing how Japanese language ideology shaped colonial histories and the postcolonial present in East Asia.A Center for Korean Research Book

Autor

Christina Yi is assistant professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of British Columbia.

Inhalt

AcknowledgmentsA Note on Names, Terminology, and TranslationsIntroduction1. National Language Ideology in the Age of Empire2. “Let Me In!”: Imperialization in Metropolitan Japan3. Envisioning a Literature of the Imperial Nation4. Coming to Terms with the Terms of the Past5. Colonial Legacies and the Divided “I” in Occupation-Period Japan6. Collaboration, Wartime Responsibility, and Colonial MemoryEpilogueAppendix: Korean Authors and Literary CriticsNotesSelected BibliographyIndex

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 6.3.2018
• Zusatzinfo: 2 b&w photos
• Verlagsort: New York
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• ISBN-10: 0-231-54536-3 / 0231545363
• ISBN-13: 978-0-231-54536-5 / 9780231545365