UC Berkeley

This dissertation offers a prehistory of contemporary Asian American anti-imperialist politics by reading Korean diasporic literature from the 1930s and the 1960s. Examining these early decades of Korean diasporic literature prior to its institutional rise in the 1990s reveals the changing horizons of its anti-imperialist imagination across the last century. Post-’80s Korean diasporic literature has served as ground zero for the “melancholic turn” of Asian American studies, producing critical efforts to remember traumatic colonial histories and losses that shadow Asian American lives. The significance of earlier diasporic writing in understanding today’s melancholic anti-imperialism, however, has remained obscured. The writers I consider—Chu Yosŏp (1902–1972), Nak Chung Thun (1876–1953), and Richard Kim (1932–2009)—use their literary works to explore how Korea and the Korean diaspora might be liberated from imperial violence. Their novelistic endeavors not only push against national boundaries but also adopt politically radical visions of the future, informed by the international leftist movements of their times. While the ’30s and ’60s are both decades in which the possibility of a leftist future was disappearing from the Korean imaginary—whether due to Japanese colonial rule or the rise of South Korea’s anti-communist authoritarian regime—Chu, Thun, and Kim participate in the making of a global left literary atlas. I show how these writers navigated the contradictions and injustices of their historical experiences while also experimenting in genres as varied as naturalism, romance, and alternate history. I first recover a vibrant Korean diasporic literary scene of the ’30s, approaching translation as an opportunity to excavate voices that crossed the borders of national leftist literary cultures. I then show how the diasporic ’60s suffers from the unavailability of leftist politics in authoritarian South Korea, while still remembering and longing for past radicalisms. I argue that this melancholia bridges the ’60s and the post-’80s, in that while the earlier writers’ visions of the future may seem lost today, their recovery reintroduces the importance of anti-capitalist critique in advancing anti-imperialist work. The literary history I present opens a window onto leftist internationalist visions and the radical futures that once existed in diasporic imaginations.