abstract:North Korean women encounter traumatic experiences escaping from North Korea. Upon arriving in South Korea, despite being officially welcomed as co-ethnics, many North Korean migrants find that their hopes for a better life are not realized. On the one hand, women arriving from the North are ethnic Koreans and speak the same language as South Koreans. On the other hand, they are in a territory whose culture and society are entirely foreign to them. Against this background, women from North Korea experience considerable trauma in South Korea as they struggle to negotiate new identities as gendered, liminal subjects in a cultural borderland. This article discusses a dance performance by an all-female performing arts troupe, P'yŏngyang Minsok Yesultan, to answer the following questions: How does the performance articulate traumatic and gendered migration experiences? To what extent might performance restore agency for North Korean trauma subjects? By closely engaging with North Korean women's migration experiences and their performance practices in South Korea, the author shows that performance practices represent potentially empowering, affective sites that may open a space for restoration of North Korean women's agency.
{"title":"Performing in the \"Cultural Borderlands\": Gender, Trauma, and Performance Practices of a North Korean Women's Musical Troupe in South Korea","authors":"Iain Sands","doi":"10.1353/ACH.2019.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ACH.2019.0002","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:North Korean women encounter traumatic experiences escaping from North Korea. Upon arriving in South Korea, despite being officially welcomed as co-ethnics, many North Korean migrants find that their hopes for a better life are not realized. On the one hand, women arriving from the North are ethnic Koreans and speak the same language as South Koreans. On the other hand, they are in a territory whose culture and society are entirely foreign to them. Against this background, women from North Korea experience considerable trauma in South Korea as they struggle to negotiate new identities as gendered, liminal subjects in a cultural borderland. This article discusses a dance performance by an all-female performing arts troupe, P'yŏngyang Minsok Yesultan, to answer the following questions: How does the performance articulate traumatic and gendered migration experiences? To what extent might performance restore agency for North Korean trauma subjects? By closely engaging with North Korean women's migration experiences and their performance practices in South Korea, the author shows that performance practices represent potentially empowering, affective sites that may open a space for restoration of North Korean women's agency.","PeriodicalId":43542,"journal":{"name":"Cross-Currents-East Asian History and Culture Review","volume":"8 1","pages":"41 - 67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/ACH.2019.0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66757118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:In the early twentieth century, while smallpox, cholera, and other diseases caused temporary but urgent health crises in China, pulmonary tuberculosis remained a leading cause of mortality. This article investigates efforts to prevent and control tuberculosis in Republican China, especially efforts to implement the Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine as a preventive measure against the disease. Published materials show that efforts to introduce this vaccine during the early 1930s met with skepticism on the part of Chinese physicians and inaction on the part of the state. Although the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) presented an obstacle to BCG research and development, it also provided new opportunities for members of China's biomedical research community—many of whom had moved with the Nationalist government to the nation's western hinterlands—to learn about new methods of producing vaccines and study methods of epidemic control. In the case of BCG, these processes bore fruit only in the years after the war ended, when a review of medical literature suggests that in the tumultuous years of civil war between 1945 and 1949, health administrators began to plan for implementation of the BCG vaccine on a large scale for the first time. But questions of the ability of this biochemical method to prevent an airborne disease, and the role of environmental and social factors in causing tuberculosis, lingered throughout this period.
{"title":"Danger in the Air: Tuberculosis Control and BCG Vaccination in the Republic of China, 1930–1949","authors":"M. Brazelton","doi":"10.1353/ACH.2019.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ACH.2019.0006","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In the early twentieth century, while smallpox, cholera, and other diseases caused temporary but urgent health crises in China, pulmonary tuberculosis remained a leading cause of mortality. This article investigates efforts to prevent and control tuberculosis in Republican China, especially efforts to implement the Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine as a preventive measure against the disease. Published materials show that efforts to introduce this vaccine during the early 1930s met with skepticism on the part of Chinese physicians and inaction on the part of the state. Although the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) presented an obstacle to BCG research and development, it also provided new opportunities for members of China's biomedical research community—many of whom had moved with the Nationalist government to the nation's western hinterlands—to learn about new methods of producing vaccines and study methods of epidemic control. In the case of BCG, these processes bore fruit only in the years after the war ended, when a review of medical literature suggests that in the tumultuous years of civil war between 1945 and 1949, health administrators began to plan for implementation of the BCG vaccine on a large scale for the first time. But questions of the ability of this biochemical method to prevent an airborne disease, and the role of environmental and social factors in causing tuberculosis, lingered throughout this period.","PeriodicalId":43542,"journal":{"name":"Cross-Currents-East Asian History and Culture Review","volume":"8 1","pages":"139 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/ACH.2019.0006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45165124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:This article analyzes two films from 2009 that are not only striking in their use of children as protagonists but also noteworthy in returning to the once-popular subject of abandoned children: So Yong Kim's Treeless Mountain and Ounie Lecomte's A Brand New Life. The significance of these two works lies in their similar narratives of abandonment and journeying but also in the comparable backgrounds of the filmmakers as Westerners with Korean origins. Both filmmakers left Korea as children. Both films were created as mementos of the filmmakers' Korean roots and childhoods in Korea. This article's analysis of the films is twofold. First, a textual reading reveals child perspectives and their matching visuals as playing crucial roles in understating—or concealing even—the gravity of the issues of abandonment and adoption embodied in the narratives. Second, the author discusses the "accented context" of the films and their filmmakers, borrowing from Hamid Naficy's theory of "accented cinema" (2001). The geographic and thematic return to Korea and the Korean family by these Western-Korean filmmakers brings forth questions beyond the narratives, of what constitutes a Korean film and a Korean experience.
{"title":"The Forgotten Childhoods of Korea: Ounie Lecomte's A Brand New Life (2009) and So Yong Kim's Treeless Mountain (2009)","authors":"Jinsoo An","doi":"10.1353/ACH.2019.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ACH.2019.0001","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article analyzes two films from 2009 that are not only striking in their use of children as protagonists but also noteworthy in returning to the once-popular subject of abandoned children: So Yong Kim's Treeless Mountain and Ounie Lecomte's A Brand New Life. The significance of these two works lies in their similar narratives of abandonment and journeying but also in the comparable backgrounds of the filmmakers as Westerners with Korean origins. Both filmmakers left Korea as children. Both films were created as mementos of the filmmakers' Korean roots and childhoods in Korea. This article's analysis of the films is twofold. First, a textual reading reveals child perspectives and their matching visuals as playing crucial roles in understating—or concealing even—the gravity of the issues of abandonment and adoption embodied in the narratives. Second, the author discusses the \"accented context\" of the films and their filmmakers, borrowing from Hamid Naficy's theory of \"accented cinema\" (2001). The geographic and thematic return to Korea and the Korean family by these Western-Korean filmmakers brings forth questions beyond the narratives, of what constitutes a Korean film and a Korean experience.","PeriodicalId":43542,"journal":{"name":"Cross-Currents-East Asian History and Culture Review","volume":"8 1","pages":"19 - 40"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/ACH.2019.0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45228734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This article examines the multiple ways Chinese writers depicted the incorporation of female national subjects into the struggle to liberate Manchuria after it was annexed by Japan in 1932. Whereas male writers such as Xiao Jun (1907–1988) and Luo Binji (1917–1994) have integrated the multiethnic population of Manchuria, particularly foreign women, into the cause of liberation through marital and sexual relations, the female writer Xiao Hong (1911–1941) depicts the relationships of Russian Jewish, Korean, and Chinese refugee women as lateral friendships. Xiao Hong notes the presence of these three ethnic subjects outside the nation but does not seek to coopt them into China's national cause, instead calling attention to a separate relationality, which literary scholars Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih term "minor transnationalism" (Lionnet and Shih 2005). They suggest that minor literatures and cultures are not always juxtaposed with major ones; instead, literary relationships can occur between minor cultures. Focusing on three friendships between minor subjects, this article analyzes and compares three short works by Xiao Hong—about a Russian Jew, a Korean, and Xiao Hong herself—and explores her problematization of diasporic nostalgia and the gendered incorporation of ethnic subjects into the cause of national liberation.
{"title":"Homeless in the Fatherland: Xiao Hong's Migrant Geographies","authors":"Clara Iwasaki","doi":"10.1353/ach.2019.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ach.2019.0022","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article examines the multiple ways Chinese writers depicted the incorporation of female national subjects into the struggle to liberate Manchuria after it was annexed by Japan in 1932. Whereas male writers such as Xiao Jun (1907–1988) and Luo Binji (1917–1994) have integrated the multiethnic population of Manchuria, particularly foreign women, into the cause of liberation through marital and sexual relations, the female writer Xiao Hong (1911–1941) depicts the relationships of Russian Jewish, Korean, and Chinese refugee women as lateral friendships. Xiao Hong notes the presence of these three ethnic subjects outside the nation but does not seek to coopt them into China's national cause, instead calling attention to a separate relationality, which literary scholars Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih term \"minor transnationalism\" (Lionnet and Shih 2005). They suggest that minor literatures and cultures are not always juxtaposed with major ones; instead, literary relationships can occur between minor cultures. Focusing on three friendships between minor subjects, this article analyzes and compares three short works by Xiao Hong—about a Russian Jew, a Korean, and Xiao Hong herself—and explores her problematization of diasporic nostalgia and the gendered incorporation of ethnic subjects into the cause of national liberation.","PeriodicalId":43542,"journal":{"name":"Cross-Currents-East Asian History and Culture Review","volume":"8 1","pages":"634 - 660"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/ach.2019.0022","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49523425","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:This article analyzes media responses to a 2010 Greenpeace China report titled Swimming in Poison. Among other alarming data, the report states that fish from collection points along the Yangtze River showed elevated levels of harmful "environmental hormones" (huanjing jisu), also referred to as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). Scholars have critiqued EDC science and activism for its heteronormative pathologizing of inter-sexuality, nonreproductive sexual activity, and impaired fertility, drawing attention to the "sex panic" at work in EDC discourse. This article shows that such sex panic is neither necessary nor universal in anxieties surrounding EDCs. Unlike media responses to EDC events in Europe and North America, Chinese news articles that followed the report did not focus on anxieties surrounding sexual transgression. Instead, media reactions focused on food safety, industrial capitalism, and the ecological scope of pollution. Based on this analysis, the author argues that the disruptive quality and analytic potential of China's environmental hormones has less to do with a defense of sexual purity or bodily integrity, and more to do with acknowledging the depths to which human and nonhuman bodies in today's China are suffused with the sometimes toxic social, economic, political, and chemical environments in which people eat, grow, and live.
{"title":"\"Swimming in Poison\": Reimagining Endocrine Disruption through China's Environmental Hormones","authors":"Janelle Lamoreaux","doi":"10.1353/ACH.2019.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ACH.2019.0008","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article analyzes media responses to a 2010 Greenpeace China report titled Swimming in Poison. Among other alarming data, the report states that fish from collection points along the Yangtze River showed elevated levels of harmful \"environmental hormones\" (huanjing jisu), also referred to as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). Scholars have critiqued EDC science and activism for its heteronormative pathologizing of inter-sexuality, nonreproductive sexual activity, and impaired fertility, drawing attention to the \"sex panic\" at work in EDC discourse. This article shows that such sex panic is neither necessary nor universal in anxieties surrounding EDCs. Unlike media responses to EDC events in Europe and North America, Chinese news articles that followed the report did not focus on anxieties surrounding sexual transgression. Instead, media reactions focused on food safety, industrial capitalism, and the ecological scope of pollution. Based on this analysis, the author argues that the disruptive quality and analytic potential of China's environmental hormones has less to do with a defense of sexual purity or bodily integrity, and more to do with acknowledging the depths to which human and nonhuman bodies in today's China are suffused with the sometimes toxic social, economic, political, and chemical environments in which people eat, grow, and live.","PeriodicalId":43542,"journal":{"name":"Cross-Currents-East Asian History and Culture Review","volume":"8 1","pages":"195 - 223"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/ACH.2019.0008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43318174","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:Plastic Paradise (1997), a massive yet precarious-looking vertical installation made of cheap, mass-produced industrial consumer goods found in popular places in Seoul, is one of a series of installations that South Korean artist Choi Jeonghwa (b. 1961) has produced since the mid-1990s. With architectonic metaphors that enact a uniquely self-reflective critique of Korean modern society and its ethos, this excessively vertical installation signifies the utopian hope of the Korean masses toward industrialization. However, its fragile material structure alludes to a counter-utopian reality latent in Korea's compressed growth (apch'uksŏngjang). This article provides a reading of the visual and tactile elements of Choi's art, which presents its unique structure as a cue for a nuanced social critique. Presenting samples of mass production as testaments to a modern utopia, Plastic Paradise critiques the pervasive myth within a society of mass consumption that these goods have become the totem of happiness "for all." Inspired by Choi's original observation of the dynamic form of the life of the masses, the installation also demonstrates how their seemingly mundane, everyday life is punctuated by the iconoclastic utopianism that they embrace for the future, and their understated creativity that continues to adapt and transform the given environment. In this way, the installation becomes both a monument and an antimonument to the state of development and its pervasive optimism.
{"title":"Modernity, Plastic Spectacle, and an Imperfect Utopia: A Critical Reflection on Plastic Paradise (1997) by Choi Jeonghwa","authors":"Soyang Park","doi":"10.1353/ACH.2018.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ACH.2018.0010","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Plastic Paradise (1997), a massive yet precarious-looking vertical installation made of cheap, mass-produced industrial consumer goods found in popular places in Seoul, is one of a series of installations that South Korean artist Choi Jeonghwa (b. 1961) has produced since the mid-1990s. With architectonic metaphors that enact a uniquely self-reflective critique of Korean modern society and its ethos, this excessively vertical installation signifies the utopian hope of the Korean masses toward industrialization. However, its fragile material structure alludes to a counter-utopian reality latent in Korea's compressed growth (apch'uksŏngjang). This article provides a reading of the visual and tactile elements of Choi's art, which presents its unique structure as a cue for a nuanced social critique. Presenting samples of mass production as testaments to a modern utopia, Plastic Paradise critiques the pervasive myth within a society of mass consumption that these goods have become the totem of happiness \"for all.\" Inspired by Choi's original observation of the dynamic form of the life of the masses, the installation also demonstrates how their seemingly mundane, everyday life is punctuated by the iconoclastic utopianism that they embrace for the future, and their understated creativity that continues to adapt and transform the given environment. In this way, the installation becomes both a monument and an antimonument to the state of development and its pervasive optimism.","PeriodicalId":43542,"journal":{"name":"Cross-Currents-East Asian History and Culture Review","volume":"7 1","pages":"294 - 325"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/ACH.2018.0010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46281463","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:The anarchist movement in colonial Korea (1910–1945) has long been remembered either as a radical and violent chapter of national resistance or as a minor, utopian strand of the broader socialist movement. Both views have some grounding in historical reality, but they also invite neglect of the tremendous cultural influence that anarchist doctrines exerted over a rapidly modernizing colonial nation. Building on recent revisionary studies of anarchism in East Asia, this article traces the ways in which anarchist ideas—particularly Piotr Kropotkin's theory of anarcho-communism—entered Korean culture via the transnational routes of Japan, China, and Russia and through a painstaking process of adaptation by local writers, poets, and other cultural operators. From Hŏ Munil's utopian peasant novel, Hwang Sŏgu's ecopoetry, and Sin Ch'aeho's revolutionary fantasy fiction, to Yu Ch'ijin's theory of people's theater, anarchism had a far more profound and diverse influence on modern Korean culture than has been previously recognized. A defining process in the politics of the 1920s was the ascendance of the term minjung, referring to the ethnonational Korean people. This article identifies popular revolt, mutual aid, and ethical naturalism as the three major themes of colonial anarchism that left an enduring legacy.
{"title":"Anarchism and Culture in Colonial Korea: Minjung Revolution, Mutual Aid, and the Appeal of Nature","authors":"Sunyoung Park","doi":"10.1353/ACH.2018.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ACH.2018.0018","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:The anarchist movement in colonial Korea (1910–1945) has long been remembered either as a radical and violent chapter of national resistance or as a minor, utopian strand of the broader socialist movement. Both views have some grounding in historical reality, but they also invite neglect of the tremendous cultural influence that anarchist doctrines exerted over a rapidly modernizing colonial nation. Building on recent revisionary studies of anarchism in East Asia, this article traces the ways in which anarchist ideas—particularly Piotr Kropotkin's theory of anarcho-communism—entered Korean culture via the transnational routes of Japan, China, and Russia and through a painstaking process of adaptation by local writers, poets, and other cultural operators. From Hŏ Munil's utopian peasant novel, Hwang Sŏgu's ecopoetry, and Sin Ch'aeho's revolutionary fantasy fiction, to Yu Ch'ijin's theory of people's theater, anarchism had a far more profound and diverse influence on modern Korean culture than has been previously recognized. A defining process in the politics of the 1920s was the ascendance of the term minjung, referring to the ethnonational Korean people. This article identifies popular revolt, mutual aid, and ethical naturalism as the three major themes of colonial anarchism that left an enduring legacy.","PeriodicalId":43542,"journal":{"name":"Cross-Currents-East Asian History and Culture Review","volume":"7 1","pages":"504 - 532"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/ACH.2018.0018","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42007009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Afterword: Mapping Socialism Across Eurasia","authors":"Edward Tyerman","doi":"10.1353/ACH.2018.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ACH.2018.0019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43542,"journal":{"name":"Cross-Currents-East Asian History and Culture Review","volume":"7 1","pages":"533 - 542"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/ACH.2018.0019","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42058674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:During the 1920s, Soviet cultural authorities sought to develop a new, post-imperialist literature that would acknowledge a "new East" and supersede the enchanted exoticism of writers like Pierre Loti. They also sought to establish in the countries of the Far East institutional and individual cultural links that might attract leading writers there to the cause of communist internationalism. With these goals in mind, they sent to East Asia two prominent writers, first Sergei Tretiakov, who spent eighteen months in 1924 and 1925 as a professor of Russian literature at Peking University and correspondent for Pravda, and then Boris Pilniak, who traveled to China, Japan, and Mongolia in 1926 (and returned to Japan for a visit in 1932). This article discusses these writers' visits and some of the literary works they generated in response to their encounters with East Asia in order to address the general question of whether communist internationalist culture was generated vertically (by instructions, efforts, and institutions set up by "Moscow" and the Comintern) or forged horizontally (by personal links and as a result of individual agency). As a case study in how the two writers attempted to present a more authentic account of the East, the article discusses the contrasting ways they represented the Chinese revolutionary.
{"title":"Boris Pilniak and Sergei Tretiakov as Soviet Envoys to China and Japan and Forgers of New, Post-Imperial Narratives (1924–1926)","authors":"K. Clark","doi":"10.1353/ACH.2018.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ACH.2018.0015","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:During the 1920s, Soviet cultural authorities sought to develop a new, post-imperialist literature that would acknowledge a \"new East\" and supersede the enchanted exoticism of writers like Pierre Loti. They also sought to establish in the countries of the Far East institutional and individual cultural links that might attract leading writers there to the cause of communist internationalism. With these goals in mind, they sent to East Asia two prominent writers, first Sergei Tretiakov, who spent eighteen months in 1924 and 1925 as a professor of Russian literature at Peking University and correspondent for Pravda, and then Boris Pilniak, who traveled to China, Japan, and Mongolia in 1926 (and returned to Japan for a visit in 1932). This article discusses these writers' visits and some of the literary works they generated in response to their encounters with East Asia in order to address the general question of whether communist internationalist culture was generated vertically (by instructions, efforts, and institutions set up by \"Moscow\" and the Comintern) or forged horizontally (by personal links and as a result of individual agency). As a case study in how the two writers attempted to present a more authentic account of the East, the article discusses the contrasting ways they represented the Chinese revolutionary.","PeriodicalId":43542,"journal":{"name":"Cross-Currents-East Asian History and Culture Review","volume":"7 1","pages":"423 - 448"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/ACH.2018.0015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42685411","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:In light of recent studies that situate the early twentieth-century Korean-Manchurian writer Kang Kyŏngae within the global formation of colonial modernity rather than the chronicles of nationalist anticolonialism, this article argues for the relevance of Kang and of the state of Manchukuo to the ongoing study of the relationship between peripheral literary forms and capitalist modernity. Because it was an economic and ideological testing ground, Manchukuo challenges the apparent characteristics of a periphery. Examining Manchukuo's cultural and literary production thus calls for a new means of understanding peripheral literature's capacity to reveal nuanced dimensions of the capitalist world-system. This article shows how the idea of peripheral realism, a theoretical framework proposed by Jed Esty and Colleen Lye (2012), makes it possible to constellate Kang's novelistic form within new horizons of comparability and recovered histories of cultural production far from capitalism's centers. Viewed through this lens, Kang's work in turn helps to break up a falsely monolithic notion of the non-Western periphery and illustrate its variegated texture. To demonstrate this process, Kang's 1934 novella Salt (Sogŭm) is examined through the protagonist's incongruous yet highly reflective cognitive capacity, which operates as the very mode of registering and responding to Manchukuo's internal contradictions. To the extent that Salt attempts to grasp the reality of a complicated capitalist imperialist society from a peripheral subject's compromised vantage point, Kang stands as a consequential voice for coming to terms with peripheral realism and its possibilities.
{"title":"Writing Manchukuo: Peripheral Realism and Awareness in Kang Kyŏngae's Salt","authors":"Jeehyun Choi","doi":"10.1353/ACH.2018.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ACH.2018.0016","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In light of recent studies that situate the early twentieth-century Korean-Manchurian writer Kang Kyŏngae within the global formation of colonial modernity rather than the chronicles of nationalist anticolonialism, this article argues for the relevance of Kang and of the state of Manchukuo to the ongoing study of the relationship between peripheral literary forms and capitalist modernity. Because it was an economic and ideological testing ground, Manchukuo challenges the apparent characteristics of a periphery. Examining Manchukuo's cultural and literary production thus calls for a new means of understanding peripheral literature's capacity to reveal nuanced dimensions of the capitalist world-system. This article shows how the idea of peripheral realism, a theoretical framework proposed by Jed Esty and Colleen Lye (2012), makes it possible to constellate Kang's novelistic form within new horizons of comparability and recovered histories of cultural production far from capitalism's centers. Viewed through this lens, Kang's work in turn helps to break up a falsely monolithic notion of the non-Western periphery and illustrate its variegated texture. To demonstrate this process, Kang's 1934 novella Salt (Sogŭm) is examined through the protagonist's incongruous yet highly reflective cognitive capacity, which operates as the very mode of registering and responding to Manchukuo's internal contradictions. To the extent that Salt attempts to grasp the reality of a complicated capitalist imperialist society from a peripheral subject's compromised vantage point, Kang stands as a consequential voice for coming to terms with peripheral realism and its possibilities.","PeriodicalId":43542,"journal":{"name":"Cross-Currents-East Asian History and Culture Review","volume":"7 1","pages":"449 - 473"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/ACH.2018.0016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44922535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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