#ZLWC2017
Meet the Presenters
Zainichi (lit. “residing in Japan”) Koreans are the largest diasporic community in Japan, and their writings comprise a diverse – and sometimes critically divisive – literary corpus. Despite the important role zainichi Korean writers have played in Japanese(-language) literary production, however, scholarship on their texts remains underrepresented in North America, not to mention within Japan itself. We have come together to envision new research on race/ethnicity, nationhood, empire, and diaspora through the study of zainichi literary texts, a body of work that deserves much more attention in academia than it has currently received.
“‘Good Korean’ or Race Traitor? Reorienting ‘Zainichi’ Writing from Futei Senjin to Sangokujin”
Andre Haag is an assistant professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Hawaii in Mānoa. Haag’s research explores how Japanese fear of Korean crime and “terrorism” inflected colonial vocabularies, representations, tropes, and narratives of imperial identities in the decades following the Korean annexation.
“Savoring the Apple: Gender, Desire, and Identity in Yi Yang-Ji’s Yuhi and Kim Ch'ang-Saeng’s 'Akai mi'"
Catherine Ryu is an associate professor of Japanese culture and literature at Michigan State University. Her research and teaching interests include Heian narratives, Japanese court poetry, zainichi literature, gender studies, translation studies, game studies, second language learning, global studies, and digital humanities.
“The Circle Movement in the 1950s and Its Imaginative Power in East Asia”
Koji Toba is a professor of Japanese literature at the School of Letters, Arts and Sciences at Waseda University. His research initially focused on Abe Kōbō and his contemporaries; it has since expanded to include the cultural and political movements of the 1950s.
“A Zainichi Woman’s Body as a Battlefield”
Nobuko Yamasaki is an assistant professor of Japanese at Lehigh University. Her research and teaching focus on intersections of art, literature, film, and gender and sexuality studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript, entitled Fragmenting History: Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of Empire.
“Fissuring Literary Boundaries: The Emergence of Zainichi Literature Under the US Military Occupation”
Jonathan Glade is an assistant professor of Japanese and Global Studies at Michigan State University. His research focuses on Korean and Japanese literature during the postwar US Military Occupation. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Occupied Liberation: Continued Intersections of Korean and Japanese Literature, 1945–1952.
“Digitizing Ethnic Identity—Gender and Performativity in Recent Zainichi Cinema”
Nathaniel Heneghan is a visiting assistant professor in the College of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. His writing will appear in the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema and he is currently revising his dissertation, which considers the changing representation of zainichi Korean identity in postwar literature and film.
“The Place of Language, the Language of Place: Narrative Voice as Traveler-Translator in Yi Yangji's Yuhi”
Cindi Textor is a postdoctoral associate in the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University. Her dissertation, “Radical Language, Radical Identity: Korean Writers in Japanese Spaces and the Burden to 'Represent',” explores Korean writers’ attempts to represent difference in the face of colonial and post-colonial assimilation.
“Cultural Activism by Zainichi Koreans in 1950s Japan: Between the Japanese Archipelago and the Korean Peninsula”
Shoya Unoda is an associate professor of Japanese studies at the Graduate School of Letters, Osaka University. He specializes in Japanese intellectual history. He has been working on postwar Japanese social movements, with special focus on the cultural activism by Zainichi Koreans in the 1950s.
“Postcolonial Legacies and the Divided ‘I’ in Occupation-Period Japan”
Christina Yi is an 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 primarily focuses on Japanese-language literature by ethnic Korean writers from the 1930s to the present.