Representing Radical Difference
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12423665 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Cindi Textor (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 499-529 |
| Publication date | 2019-07-17 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | positions asia critique (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1067-9847 • E-ISSN: 1527-8271 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/10679847-7539290 |
| OpenAlex | W2959410449 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 22 |
This article considers the politics of representing “Korea” in Japanese-language texts, focusing specifically on the work of “Zainichi” writer Kim Sŏkpŏm (1925–). The author begins by identifying parallels between what Kim calls “the spellbinding of language” (kotoba no jubaku) and the unresolved debate over Frederic Jameson’s statement that “all third-world texts are necessarily . . . national allegories.” Kim’s “spellbinding” refers to the dual impossibilities faced by postcolonial Korean writers in Japan, who can neither maintain a distance from the Japanese language nor take full and unquestioned ownership of it. This double bind is echoed by the discourse on national allegory, with its simultaneous impulses to avoid reifying the categories of first world and third world as incommensurably “different,” while also combatting a Eurocentric universalism that fails to acknowledge productive, nonessentialist difference. The author examines Kim Sŏkpŏm’s specific solutions to this critical impasse in his works of fiction, particularly Karasu no shi (The Death of a Crow, 1957) and Mandogi yūrei kitan (The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost, 1970), demonstrating that Kim is able to destabilize the Japanese language of his novels by creating a tension between the main text and the fragments of Korean language embedded within. In this way, Kim carves out a space for the performance of a Korean identity that is ultimately only imaginary, and it is through this process that a potentially empowering identification with an explicitly imagined Korean “nation” can be forged
Aesthetics · Allegory · Art · Identity (music · Linguistics · Literature · National identity · Parallels · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Statement (logic · The Imaginary · Universalism · Asian Culture and Media Studies · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Socioeconomic Development in Asia
Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism
The Trope of the Ghost and Cultural Hybridity in Kim Sok Pom’s Mandogi Yūrei Kitan (The Extraordinary Ghost Story of Mandogi), (1971)
Minjok as a Modern and Democratic Construct
Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism
Translingual Practice
The Cheju-do Rebellion
Recentring Asia Histories, Encounters, Identities
Colonial Modernity in Korea
Becoming Japanese
The National Allegory Revisited
A Brief Response
Intimate Empire
Imagined communities
In other worlds
"Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the "National Allegory
Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
Subject and Substratum
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |