Colonizing Language – Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea - Hardcover

Yi, Christina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0231184204 ISBN 13: 9780231184205

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2018

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Author

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0231184204
• ISBN 13: 9780231184205
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240