Seminar:
Language Ideology and Literature in Imperial Japan and Beyond

Dr. Christina Yi
University of British Columbia

17 February 2016 (Web)
4:30-6:00 pm
Room 4.36, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU.

With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, Japan officially embarked on an enterprise of territorial expansion. Acquisition of Taiwan occurred in 1895, soon followed by the annexation of Korea in 1910. The unconditional surrender of Japan to the Allied Powers in 1945 signaled not only the end of the Pacific War but also the end of the Japanese empire, as one of the conditions of surrender was the redrawing of national borders. The Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–1952) that followed introduced changes not only in the political arena, but also in the ways “Japan” and “the Japanese” themselves were defined and discussed. This talk illuminates some of these postwar changes – as well as prewar continuities – by examining the history of linguistic nationalism and language ideology in modern Japan. In particular, it will look at the Japanese-language writings of Yi Kwangsu (1892–1950?), Shiga Naoya (1883–1971), and Nakano Shigeharu (1902–1979) in order to show how the dialectic relationship between metropole and periphery shapes linguistic, literary, and political experiences across and beyond nations even today.

Bio:
Christina Yi is Assistant Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at the University of British Columbia. She received her Ph.D. in Modern Japanese Literature from Columbia University. Her research focuses on the rise of Japanese-language literature by Korean colonial subjects during the 1930s and 1940s and its subsequent impact on discourse regarding “national” and “ethnic minority” literature in postwar Japan and Korea. She is currently serving as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Research Fellow at Waseda University, where she is working on a book manuscript that investigates how linguistic nationalism and national identity intersect in the formation of modern literary canons in East Asia.

For enquiries, please contact Dr. Selina Lai-Henderson, at sels@hku.hk.