Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea

With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, Japan embarked on a policy of territorial expansion. Acquisition of Taiwan occurred in 1895, soon followed by the annexation of Korea in 1910. Assimilation policies in Japan's colonies led to a significant body of literature written in Japanese by colonial writers by the 1930s. After its unconditional surrender to the Allied powers in 1945, Japan abruptly receded to a nation-state, establishing its present-day borders. Following Korea's liberation, Korean was claimed as the national language of the Korean people, and Japanese-language texts were purged from the Korean literary canon. At the same time, these same texts were excluded from the Japanese literary canon, which was reconfigured along national, rather than imperial, borders.

In Colonizing Language, Christina Yi investigates how linguistic nationalism and national identity intersect in the formation of modern literary canons through an examination of Japanese-language cultural production by Korean and Japanese writers from the 1930s through the 1950s, analyzing how key texts were produced, received, and circulated during the rise and fall of the Japanese empire. She considers a range of Japanese-language writings by Korean colonial subjects published in the 1930s and early 1940s, exploring the sociopolitical factors involved in the production and consumption of these works. She then traces how postwar reconstructions of ethnolinguistic nationality contributed to the creation of new literary canons in Japan and Korea, with a particular focus on writers from the Korean diasporic community in Japan. Drawing upon fiction, essays, film, literary criticism, and more, Yi challenges conventional understandings of national literature by showing how Japanese language ideology shaped colonial histories and the postcolonial present in East Asia.