Manchukuo Perspectives: Transnational Approaches to Literary Production

Description

This groundbreaking volume critically examines how writers in Japanese-occupied northeast China negotiated political and artistic freedom while engaging their craft amidst an increasing atmosphere of violent conflict and foreign control. The allegedly multiethnic utopian new state of Manchukuo (1932–1945) created by supporters of imperial Japan was intended to corral the creative energies of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Russians, and Mongols. Yet, the twin poles of utopian promise and resistance to a contested state pulled these intellectuals into competing loyalties, selective engagement, or even exile and death―surpassing neat paradigms of collaboration or resistance. In a semicolony wrapped in the utopian vision of racial inclusion, their literary works articulating national ideals and even the norms of everyday life subtly reflected the complexities and contradictions of the era. Scholars from China, Korea, Japan, and North America investigate cultural production under imperial Japan’s occupation of Manchukuo. They reveal how literature and literary production more generally can serve as a penetrating lens into forgotten histories and the lives of ordinary people confronted with difficult political exigencies. Highlights of the text include transnational perspectives by leading researchers in the field and a memoir by one of Manchukuo’s last living writers. Contents Illustrations Foreword Acknowledgements Introduction Part I: Manchukuo’s Print Media and the Politics of Representation/Translation 1. Unpacking “New Manchuria” Narratives 2. Fairy Tales and the Creation of the “Future Nation” of Manchukuo 3. Spiritual Resistance 4. Utopianism Unrealized Part II: Chinese Writers in Manchukuo and “Manchukuo” Writers in Japan 5. Linguistic Hybridity, Transnational Connectivity, and the Cultural Territorialization of Colonial Literature 6. Sickness, Death, and Survival in the Works of Gu Ding and Xiao Hong 7. Manchukuo Melancholy 8. Zhu Ti and I 9. From Radical Nationalism to Anti-modernism 10. Literature Selection in a Historical Dilemma 11. Acculturation and Border-Crossing in Manchukuo Literature 12. Searching for Memories of Colonial Literature in Modern History 13. Luo Tuosheng and Manchukuo Literature Part III: Russian, Japanese, and Korean Writers in Manchukuo 14. In the Sunken Submarine 15. The Imagination of Heterogeneous Space and Implicit Transformations of Identity 16. The Literary Politics of Harmonization and Dissonance 17. “Manchuria” and the Proletarian Literature of Colonial Korea 18. Modern Korean Literature and Manchukuo Postscript Contributors Index