UC Irvine

Like many empires, the Japanese Empire (1868-1945) sought the collaboration of writers it had colonized by pressing them to work in Japanese, the imperial language. Following the empire’s fall, formerly colonized Korean and Taiwanese authors who had written in Japanese were seen as traitorous by postwar dictatorships, and their works were banned. After the Cold War, a new generation argued for re-reading these stories as ethno-national resistance. Instead of castigating or valorizing them, I offer a new approach to these works by analyzing the Japanese-language fiction of two colonized Korean authors, Kim Sa-ryang and Ch’oe Chŏng-hŭi, and two colonized Taiwanese authors, Long Ying-zong and Yang Kui. I show how they neither merely parrot imperial slogans nor advocate for straightforward nationalism, but instead give a nuanced account of colonial bourgeoisification, that is, of the Japanese Empire’s development of a liberal-capitalist economy, class structure, and culture in its colonies. I further examine the attempts of these authors to imagine a ‘fourth way,’ that is, futures for their respective colonies beyond seemingly inevitable absorption into the empire, had it continued, or postcolonial re-composition as capitalist nation states. In my first chapter I argue that Long Ying-zong, a Taiwanese writer of realist fiction, wrote several experimental stories that thematize the bourgeois Taiwanese embrace of an imperialist habitus while gesturing, in contrast, at Taiwanese readers’ power to create alternative fictions. My second chapter argues that the Korean writer Kim Sa-ryang re-situates the figure of the colonial bourgeois via the theme of enlightenment, which he figures as a dialogue between knowledge and emotion generated in cross-class relation among the human detritus of the colonized nation. In my third chapter, I show how Ch’oe Chŏng-hŭi employed the propaganda format to put forth a feminist-socialist revision of Korean history in which she demands a future without patriarchy, which both colonial nationalists and Japanese fascists were trying to redeploy to their own ends. My fourth chapter shows how Yang Kui, who is considered a dogmatic Marxist and Taiwanese nationalist, set his multiethnic, multispecies concept of solidarity against the Japanese project to use colonial labor to develop bourgeois institutions in the colonies.