Politics Program, Literature Program, Japanese Program, Historical Studies Program, Global and International Studies Program, Dean of the College, Bard Translation and Translatability Initiative, Asian Studies Program, Art History and Visual Culture Program, and Written Arts Program Present

Narrating Paranoia, Passing, and Precarity Between Japanese Colonial Texts and Zainichi Korean Fiction

The field of post/colonial East Asian cultural studies has recently rediscovered the transpacific potential of the theme of ethnic passing, a problematic that is deeply rooted in North American racial contexts but might serve to disrupt global fictions of race and power.  Although tropes adjacent to ethnonational passing frequently appear in minority literatures produced in Japan, particularly Zainichi Korean fiction, the salience of the phenomenon was often obscured within the avowedly-integrative and assimilative cultural production of Japanese colonialism. This talk will challenge that aporia by demonstrating how the structural possibility of Korean passing left behind indelible traces of racialized paranoia in the writings of the Japanese colonial empire that have long outlived its fall.  Introducing narratives and speech acts in Japanese from disparate genres, past and present, I argue that paranoia was as an effect of insecure imperial modes of containing the passing specters of Korea and Korean people uneasily absorbed within expanding Japan by colonial merger. I trace how disavowed anxieties of passing merge with fears of treachery, blurred borders, and the unreadability of ethnoracial difference in narrative scripts that traveled across space, from the colonial periphery to the Japanese metropole along with migrating bodies, between subjects, and through time. If imperial paranoia around passing took its most extreme expression in narratives of the murderous 1923 “Korean Panic,” popular Zainichi fiction today exposes not only the enduring structures of Japanese Koreaphobia (and Koreaphilia) but the persistence of shared anxieties and precarities binding former colonizer and colonized a century later. 

This meeting will be on Zoom: https://bard.zoom.us/j/89025574917

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For more information, call 845-758-6265, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 5:00 pm – 6:15 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Online Event

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