Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday by Ksenia Chizhova (review)

Abstract

ded in other things and systems. All existing sociocultural, political, and (post) colonial contexts attest to the centrality of interconnectedness even when the systems exclude and oppress. We undoubtedly need classification, boundaries, and solidarities to function as a society, but not in the ways in which these are carried out in colonial contexts through violence, erasure, and forgetting. One problem with the book, perhaps inherent in the nature of the questions it asks, is that it refers to texts and theoretical concepts either written by European authors or in European languages. For instance, chapter 3 discusses India, using Forster’s novel, as if India had no history prior to colonial rule. Indeed, the author attempts to underscore the limits but also the potentialities of the colonial encounter, but doing so obscures India and its history. Despite this challenge, which is typical of projects engaging with colonialism, Modernism after Postcolonialism develops tools to comprehend the current “unequal” systems, and though such efforts may be thwarted, given creativity and imagination, existing systems can be challenged and transformed, and anxieties replaced by harmony.