Organizer and Chair: Karen Thornber, Harvard University
Discussant: Jonathan E. Abel, Bowling Green State University
Discussions of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean literatures
have been characterized by nation-oriented discourse that asserts historical
continuity, cultural cohesion, and a shared linguistic base. With the tripartite
configuration of East Asian Studies laid out as, ontologically, the way things
are, scholarship on East Asian literatures has been driven by a discourse of
differentiation, of detecting forms, themes, elocutions, and other features
that can be construed as singular to China, Japan, or Korea. Even the seemingly
cosmopolitan enterprise of East Asian comparative literature has tended, ultimately,
to be characterized by rendering one literary culture distinct from the other
two. This panel explores the implications of moving discussion of East Asian
literatures from discourse of differentiation to articulations of transcultural
networks. Jason Webb sets the stage by exploring how efforts to effect non-hierarchical
East Asian collaborative research in the humanities have wrestled with larger
trends of resurgent nationalism. The remaining three papers focus on the ways
modern East Asian literature has defied categorization along national lines.
Karen Thornber probes how intra-Asian translation of highly censored creative
works blurred literary frontiers in the early twentieth-century. Carrying the
discussion forward, May-yi Shaw examines how postwar texts by Japanese writers
who spent their formative years in semi-colonial China negotiate multiple cultural
and linguistic identities. Chun-yu Lu wraps up our panel by exploring how Chinese
Malaysian writers have exploited difference with their mainland counterparts
to rewrite conventional notions of “Chinese” literature.
Jason P. Webb, University of Tokyo, Japan
This study argues that twentieth-century Japanese sinology, far from a secluded
realm of antiquarian research, in fact long has interacted with larger discursive
trends of Japanese “Asianism.” How did elocutions of Asian unity,
whether framed as cultural, linguistic, imperial, or “against the white
peril,” shape and respond to Japan’s institutionalized “China
studies”? At various key moments in Japan’s modern history, prominent
sinologists – and later comparatists – have added their voices to
the debate about what Japan’s relationship to its neighbors has been,
and ought to be. Ideologically, their opinions have been diverse: Yano Jin’ichi,
writing in the 1920’s, promoted the idea of China as a borderless “civilization” rather
than a “state”; postwar Lu Xun specialist Takeuchi Yoshimi idealized
the Chinese communist revolution; Kojima Noriyuki and Nakanishi Susumu, beginning
in the 1960’s, looked to classical Chinese literature as a way to offset
the chauvinist Japanese “national literature” establishment; and
Suzuki Shûji applied economic bubble-era triumphalist Nihonjin-ron to
the problematic of “Japanese reception.” All of which leads us to
the question: how best to characterize contemporary Japanese sinology and
comparative literary studies? How do recent efforts to effect non-hierarchical
East Asian collaborative research in the humanities jibe with larger trends
of economic regionalism, resurgent nationalism, and a newly dominant China?
After briefly surveying different stages of twentieth-century Japanese Asianism,
I will discuss the results of interviews with several generations of Japanese
sinologists.
Karen Thornber, Harvard University
Early twentieth-century Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese writers – many
of whom spent time in Japan, befriended Japanese writers, and published in Japanese
periodicals – reconfigured thousands of Japanese novels, plays, poems,
and short stories. This paper looks at one of the most striking sets of colonial
and semi-colonial reconfigurations, Chinese and Korean translations based on
heavily censored Japanese poetry and prose. Translators defied the hand of Japanese
censors by replacing fuseji (censorship marks) and blank spaces with words.
Their creations are literary hybrids that belong as much to Chinese, Korean,
and Taiwanese literature as they do to Japanese literature. I focus primarily
on the Korean translation of the proletarian writer Nakano Shigeharu’s
(1902-1979) poem, “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki” (Shinagawa Station
in the Rain, 1929) and the Chinese translations of wartime writer Ishikawa Tatsuzô’s
(1905-1985) novel, Ikiteiru heitai (Living Soldiers, 1938). Nakano’s poem
was translated into Korean several months after its publication in Japan, its
fuseji replaced by lines advocating the murder of the Japanese emperor. Ishikawa’s
novel, despite being banned in Japan for its exposure of Japanese atrocities
in China, was translated into Chinese three times in 1938 alone. Examining
how colonial and semi-colonial translations of heavily censored imperial literature
reconfigured their sources, and how sources and translations in turn were
reconfigured by Japanese writers and editors in the postwar period, offers valuable
insights into processes of transcultural negotiation.
May-yi Shaw, Harvard University
This paper argues that narratives by writers who have considerable experience
abroad, especially Japanese who lived in Japan’s semi-colony China and
colonies Korea and Taiwan during the Second World War, frequently negotiate
cultural and linguistic identities, blurring boundaries between and ultimately
fusing “homeland” and “foreign.” I focus on writings
by Hayashi Kyoko (1930–), who although known primarily as a writer of
the atomic bomb, also wrote extensively about China, and Shanghai in particular,
where she spent fourteen of her formative years. Like her atomic bomb fiction,
Hayashi’s narratives on China seek to erase cultural and national difference
by emphasizing common humanity. Hayashi’s Shanghai (1983) is particularly
noteworthy in this regard. A fictional travelogue based on her 1981 trip to
Shanghai, her first return to China since her repatriation in 1945, this text
employs multiple languages and features characters with multiple identities.
Repeatedly claiming that Shanghai is “hometown” and deliberately
mixing languages in conversations between Japanese tourists and local residents,
the Japanese narrator of Shanghai irreparably blurs boundaries between languages
and cultures. Shanghai, like much of Hayashi’s work, thereby challenges
conventional notions of “national” language and literature by proposing
that cultural and linguistic identities often are more acutely shaped by the
conventions of the supposedly foreign “outer land” (gaichi) than
the nominal mother “inland” (naichi).
Chun-yu Lu, Washington University
Distinctive to Sinophone Malaysian literature is the presence of “Nanyang,” or
the “South Seas,” as represented by the conventional images of coconut
trees, rain forests, monkeys, and crocodiles. For some, these images constitute
the charm of Chinese Malaysian writers; at the same time they serve as something
of a curse. How best to interpret “Nanyang”? As a quaint vocabulary
of localisms ensuring that Chinese Malaysian writers will be noticed by a Chinese
readership? Or as an impediment to being regarded as “real” Chinese
literature? This paper explores these questions through examinations of fiction
by Li Zishu (b. 1971), a prominent contemporary Malaysian writer. In her
work, Li Zishu in some sense exoticizes, even orientalizes, her native Malaysia
by interweaving countless Nanyang stereotypes. But paradoxically these numerous
references to the flora and fauna of the islands, so common in Chinese Malaysian
literature as to render them in some sense nearly meaningless, allow Li Zishu
to renegotiate her position as an intellectual inheritor of the mainland
Chinese language and literary tradition and cultural inheritor of the Malaysian
experience. Probing the creative texts of Li Zishu and other Malaysian writers
allows us to expand our understanding of the tremendous variety of Sinophone
literatures.
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