Asian Studies Program, Division of Languages and Literature, Historical Studies Program, and Bard Translation and Translatability Initiative Present
In Japan but Not of Japan: Zainichi Korean Communities and Literatures
Monday, September 30, 2019
Olin Humanities, Room 102
5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
A talk with Dr. Christina Yi, Univ. British Columbia5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, Japan officially embarked on an enterprise of territorial expansion. Acquisition of Taiwan occurred in 1895, soon followed by the annexation of Korea in 1910.The unconditional surrender of Japan to the Allied Powers in 1945 signaled not only the end of the Asia-Pacific War but also the end of the Japanese empire, as one of the conditions of surrender was the redrawing of national borders. In the years following Japan's war defeat, critics and scholars came to retrospectively schematize the literary texts produced during the colonial period within new paradigms of national literature. Meanwhile, the term zainichi(lit: “residing in Japan”) came to be applied to the Korean diasporic community in Japan, and zainichiliterature roughly defined as texts written in Japanese by ethnically Korean writers living in Japan. This talk will illuminate the effect of these postwar changes – as well as some prewar continuities – by looking at the Japanese-language writings of zainichiKorean writers, focusing in particular on Yi Yangji (1955–1992) and Kim Sŏkpŏm (b. 1925). It will also consider the interactions that took place between those writers and their Japanese peers in order to provide a more complex picture of the politics and literatures of postwar Japan.
Christina Yi is Assistant Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at the University of British Columbia. Her first monograph, Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea, was published by Columbia University Press in 2018.
Sponsored by: Asian Studies Program; Division of Languages and Literature; Historical Studies Program; Japanese; Translation and Translatability Initiative.
For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].
For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102