Early Twentieth-Century Intra–East Asian Literary Contact Nebulae: Censored Japanese Literature in Chinese and Korean

Abstract

This article analyzes interactions among the early twentieth-century Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary worlds. The author first develops a general conceptualization of intra–East Asian literary contact nebulae. These were the ambiguous spaces, both physical and creative, where imperial Japanese, semicolonial Chinese, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese writers interacted with one another and transculturated (i.e., discussed, translated, and intertextualized) one another's writings. Among the most intriguing literary contact nebulae are Chinese and Korean transculturations of censored Japanese literature. The second half of the article explores two key examples of this phenomenon: colonial Korean translation and intertextualization of the Japanese writer Nakano Shigeharu's poem “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki” (Shinagawa Station in the Rain, February 1929) and wartime Chinese translation and intertextualization of the Japanese writer Ishikawa Tatsuzō's novella “Ikiteiru heitai” (Living Soldiers, March 1938). These transculturations embody multifaceted amalgams of (semi)colonial literary collaboration, acquiescence, and resistance vis-à-vis metropolitan imperial and cultural authority.

The Civic World of International Communism: Taiwanese communists and the Comintern (1921–1931)

“…They were also the agents of what Thornber refers to as the 'intra-East Asian transculturation'. 141 Taiwanese communists' denunciation of communism during their trial in Taihoku in 1934 142 should also be considered in light of the recantations made one year earlier by the high-ranking Japanese Communist Party leaders, such as Sano Gaku…”

FromThe Good EarthtoMother India: esthetic circulations of peasant womanhood between India and China

“…Here, another sense of a “shared temporality” emerges to produce both possibilities and failures of solidarity, and forms of agency in redefining worlds across powerful material and discursive divides (Gandhi 2005; Pratt 2008, p. 8; So 2016, pp. xxv–xxvi, 63; Thornber 2009, p. 752; Volland 2017). Thus, if my analysis of representations of the rural/peasant/woman nexus in imaginations of Indian and Chinese nations is built around resonances and affinities of genres, themes, and leftist literary and cinematic esthetic models, it is also informed by this expanded space of esthetic circulation in which the “partisan esthetics” of leftist literature and film in India and China are co-produced.…”

“…Thus, if my analysis of representations of the rural/peasant/woman nexus in imaginations of Indian and Chinese nations is built around resonances and affinities of genres, themes, and leftist literary and cinematic esthetic models, it is also informed by this expanded space of esthetic circulation in which the “partisan esthetics” of leftist literature and film in India and China are co-produced. The mapping of “co-texts” animates the dynamic between textual resonances and the space of entangled encounters, translations, forms of assimilation, transformation, criticism, and rejection between and through texts (Pratt 2008; Thornber 2009, p. 750).…”