Anti-Colonial Dreams and Their Resonant Afterlives

In 2016, Han Kang's English translated novel The Vegetarian won the International Man Booker Prize. As the first South Korean novel to win the award, the event marked a momentous occasion. At the same time, the novel's anti-colonial narrative stood in stark contrast to the award's namesake-James Man, the founder of a British sugar cooperative in 1783. The colonial roots of the award arguably undermined the novel's anti-colonial politics. Counteracting the award's colonial sensibilities that frame the novel's English distribution, this essay highlights the novel's critique of South Korea's national formation as a neocolony of U.S. empire. The novel clarifies how U.S. colonial-imperialism manifests through mechanisms of complicity and compliance, "inviting" colonized peoples into a liberal-humanist order of capitalism as the "welcome" reprieve from war. The protagonist's dream of becoming a tree rests on rejecting the human pleasures of capitalist consumption and accumulation that sustain colonial hierarchies. In South Korea, this coloniality of being manifests through histories and social practices surrounding meat consumption and how racial-sexual violence preconditions such appetites. As such, The Vegetarian stages the simultaneously unbearable and emancipatory process of divesting from colonial ontologies. At the site of the protagonist's burgeoning plant consciousness, the novel reconceives human life as expansive networks of relations and ideas that exceed distinctions between humans and other species. Most suggestive is how the pursuit of arboreality implicitly revives the anti-colonial commitments of postcolonial women across history, speaking to a resonant poesis of thought that expands on the creative potential of knowledge production

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Asian Culture and Media Studies · History · Japanese History and Culture