Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan

by Nayoung Aimee Kwon

In Intimate Empire Nayoung Aimee Kwon examines intimate cultural encounters between Korea and Japan during the colonial era and their postcolonial disavowal. After the Japanese empire’s collapse in 1945, new nation-centered histories in Korea and Japan actively erased these once ubiquitous cultural interactions that neither side wanted to remember.  Kwon reconsiders these imperial encounters and their contested legacies through the rise and fall of Japanese-language literature and other cultural exchanges between Korean and Japanese writers and artists in the Japanese empire. The contrast between the prominence of these and other forums of colonial era cultural collaborations between the colonizers and the colonized, and their denial in divided national narrations during the postcolonial aftermath, offers insights into the paradoxical nature of colonial collaboration, which Kwon characterizes as embodying desire and intimacy with violence and coercion. Through the case study of the formation and repression of imperial subjects between Korea and Japan, Kwon considers the imbrications of colonialism and modernity and the entwined legacies of colonial and Cold War histories in the Asia-Pacific more broadly.

Genres: Japan, Nonfiction, History

296 pages, Paperback

First published June 12, 2015

About the author

Nayoung Aimee Kwon is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University.

Reviews

[blank · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In the imperial logic of global capital, the culture of the former--the metropole--is symbolically constructed as the norm or legitimate, that which the latter--the colonized--as "lack" must try to perform or mimic."

Kwon's literary analysis of the colonial era of Korea, formally from 1910-1945, beginning after Korean "independence" as Japan took the peninsula as a "protectorate" after victory in the Russo-Japanese War and previously the Sino-Japanese war around 1904-1905, illuminates the multiple and complex dynamical cultural collaborations and resistances of Korean authorship.

The abject minor author writes to preform not for their colonial kin but for the colonizer metropolis. Bilingual writers sought at times to pen the I-novel (really a "we"-novel) to ease the friction of the colonial encounter. This novel, written in Japanese, was taken as sign and symbol of exotic Koreanness and 'helped' to mobilized Korean culture and its peoples for Japanese imperial expansion (the paradoxical colonial logic of differentiation and incorporation). Those who would embark to produce such works, not always with the intention of doing so, were held to the resistor or collaborator logic of the colonized--that which reduces the writings to a simple dichotomy rather than excavating the complex colonial exchange.

"The (naïve?) hopes of the colonized to be heard at the imperial discussion table face-to-face with their subjugators, where their fates were determined, without self-determination, were ultimately crushed in the hierarchical structures undergirding empire."

Kwon's analysis is notably important due to it's principled approach of appropriation and appreciation for the invaluable work of colonial writers of the fore (Jameson, Derrida, Kristeva, Said, et. al), but with ambiguity. I belive Kwon takes rather unprecedented steps towards solidarity in colonial theory with his ruminations on "the manifest desire to achieve universalist aspirations and recognition from the metropolitan center or to mediate the legitimation of marginal discourses on a global world stage . . ." He believes that colonial theory should be provincialized, in accord with Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, and that it should debunk Eurocentrism not with universalism but through collaboration with the colonial "history, literature, film studies, and so forth" of the many.

[lys · Rating 5 out of 5]

Colonialism was a project of not only domination, but also of intimacy, for all parties involved. In an excellent book, Kwon investigates the "conundrum of representation" faced by Korean authors writing under empire. Especially well written is Chapter 6 on "Performing Colonial Kitsch," which looks at the translation of a Korean play across imperial borders and back.