The 2016 Spring Convention of the Association for Japanese Social Literature (日本社会文学会二〇一六年度春季大会)
... more The 2016 Spring Convention of the Association for Japanese Social Literature (日本社会文学会二〇一六年度春季大会) University of Tokyo, Komaba Campus June 25, 2016
In her over 40-year writing career that began in the mid-1970s, postwar Japanese writer Hayashi K... more In her over 40-year writing career that began in the mid-1970s, postwar Japanese writer Hayashi Kyōko (1930- 2017) made her literary debut in the genre of "atomic bombing literature" and published several works based on her childhood experiences in the Hongkou Concession of Shanghai. The alley space she referred to as the "roji", which she developed in these narratives, evolved with changes in the political and historical world, and in the writer's personal life. This "feminotopia", initially depicted from a young child's perspective, eventually transformed into a colonial space. This article posits that a pivotal transformation occurred during the three years (1985-1988) that Kyōko spent in the United States. Beginning with a reexamination of the history of the Hongkou Concession, the paper highlights the influence of the United States in Hongkou from the early twentieth century to the pre- war era and its potential impact on Hayashi's early childhood. Against this backdrop, various texts published by Hayashi before the early 1980s and after the mid- to late- 1980s are compared and analyzed in order to examine how she reimagines and reconstructs the literary space of the Hongkou alley-community, where she lived as a child, drawing parallels with the United States, particularly the former colonial city of New Orleans. This process interweaves the space of "Shanghai", initially rooted in personal experience, with the colonial history of New Orleans and even the Allied Forces' occupation history in Japan. This can be interpreted as Hayashi's endeavor to transcend the Sino-Japanese dualism and position the Hongkou alley-community as a universal human experience in the context of the Second World War and the Cold War.
This essay is the first study from a racial perspective of Travels in China (1925), the travelogu... more This essay is the first study from a racial perspective of Travels in China (1925), the travelogue by the renowned Taisho Japanese short-story writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. The essay draws attention to the colourized body in a multiracial environment under semicolonialism and discusses how Akutagawa’s travelogue demonstrates the destruction of racial identities, including the conceptual white. Unlike other studies of Travels in China, which usually discuss Akutagawa’s trip as a whole, I divide his route into four zones – each corresponding to a chapter in the travelogue – and analyze them individually (with the understanding that none of the four zones should be considered isolated, homogeneous spaces). Tracking his route from Shanghai to the lower and middle Yangtze River, then to the northern part of the continent, and even back to Japan, we see how he, as well as those around him, ceaselessly examines his own skin colour in response to the power struggles across national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries. With ample evidence from a detailed reading of the text, this essay demonstrates the vagueness, fluidity, and instability of racial categories. For the traveller Akutagawa, in his experiences of everyday semicolonialism, race functions as a cognitive mechanism through which he absorbs and processes the social significance of each skin colour. In this way, skin colour becomes an open-ended concept (or a living metaphor) for Akutagawa rather than an inherited essence, the meaning and signification of which change depending on the different social contexts that he encounters.
This article takes up the underdiscussed issue of forced incestuous rape, an act of violence and ... more This article takes up the underdiscussed issue of forced incestuous rape, an act of violence and spectacle of sadism that is frequently seen in warfare. It offers an in-depth analysis of the postwar Japanese writer Takeda Taijun's 1956 short story "F**k Your Mother!" (Nanji no haha o!) by looking into the power dynamics in a rape forced between a Chinese woman and her son by Japanese imperial soldiers that the narrator of the story witnessed years before. After scrutinizing the evocative gender division in the moral crisis that the writer imagines the two victims facing during the rape, this article points out how Takeda ends up reinforcing a patriarchal structure that promises redemption for the humiliated man but sees the woman's mutilated body as nothing but waste excreted by the organic sekai (world). In such a world, since the man's ruination only means a transfer of energy from one man to another, destruction is idealized and shifted away from the ruins that communicate the possibilities of history. The article calls for a revisiting of women's unnamable wounds for a response to the decay of an existing paradigm such as Takeda's sekai.
The 2016 Spring Convention of the Association for Japanese Social Literature (日本社会文学会二〇一六年度春季大会)
... more The 2016 Spring Convention of the Association for Japanese Social Literature (日本社会文学会二〇一六年度春季大会) University of Tokyo, Komaba Campus June 25, 2016
In her over 40-year writing career that began in the mid-1970s, postwar Japanese writer Hayashi K... more In her over 40-year writing career that began in the mid-1970s, postwar Japanese writer Hayashi Kyōko (1930- 2017) made her literary debut in the genre of "atomic bombing literature" and published several works based on her childhood experiences in the Hongkou Concession of Shanghai. The alley space she referred to as the "roji", which she developed in these narratives, evolved with changes in the political and historical world, and in the writer's personal life. This "feminotopia", initially depicted from a young child's perspective, eventually transformed into a colonial space. This article posits that a pivotal transformation occurred during the three years (1985-1988) that Kyōko spent in the United States. Beginning with a reexamination of the history of the Hongkou Concession, the paper highlights the influence of the United States in Hongkou from the early twentieth century to the pre- war era and its potential impact on Hayashi's early childhood. Against this backdrop, various texts published by Hayashi before the early 1980s and after the mid- to late- 1980s are compared and analyzed in order to examine how she reimagines and reconstructs the literary space of the Hongkou alley-community, where she lived as a child, drawing parallels with the United States, particularly the former colonial city of New Orleans. This process interweaves the space of "Shanghai", initially rooted in personal experience, with the colonial history of New Orleans and even the Allied Forces' occupation history in Japan. This can be interpreted as Hayashi's endeavor to transcend the Sino-Japanese dualism and position the Hongkou alley-community as a universal human experience in the context of the Second World War and the Cold War.
This essay is the first study from a racial perspective of Travels in China (1925), the travelogu... more This essay is the first study from a racial perspective of Travels in China (1925), the travelogue by the renowned Taisho Japanese short-story writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. The essay draws attention to the colourized body in a multiracial environment under semicolonialism and discusses how Akutagawa’s travelogue demonstrates the destruction of racial identities, including the conceptual white. Unlike other studies of Travels in China, which usually discuss Akutagawa’s trip as a whole, I divide his route into four zones – each corresponding to a chapter in the travelogue – and analyze them individually (with the understanding that none of the four zones should be considered isolated, homogeneous spaces). Tracking his route from Shanghai to the lower and middle Yangtze River, then to the northern part of the continent, and even back to Japan, we see how he, as well as those around him, ceaselessly examines his own skin colour in response to the power struggles across national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries. With ample evidence from a detailed reading of the text, this essay demonstrates the vagueness, fluidity, and instability of racial categories. For the traveller Akutagawa, in his experiences of everyday semicolonialism, race functions as a cognitive mechanism through which he absorbs and processes the social significance of each skin colour. In this way, skin colour becomes an open-ended concept (or a living metaphor) for Akutagawa rather than an inherited essence, the meaning and signification of which change depending on the different social contexts that he encounters.
This article takes up the underdiscussed issue of forced incestuous rape, an act of violence and ... more This article takes up the underdiscussed issue of forced incestuous rape, an act of violence and spectacle of sadism that is frequently seen in warfare. It offers an in-depth analysis of the postwar Japanese writer Takeda Taijun's 1956 short story "F**k Your Mother!" (Nanji no haha o!) by looking into the power dynamics in a rape forced between a Chinese woman and her son by Japanese imperial soldiers that the narrator of the story witnessed years before. After scrutinizing the evocative gender division in the moral crisis that the writer imagines the two victims facing during the rape, this article points out how Takeda ends up reinforcing a patriarchal structure that promises redemption for the humiliated man but sees the woman's mutilated body as nothing but waste excreted by the organic sekai (world). In such a world, since the man's ruination only means a transfer of energy from one man to another, destruction is idealized and shifted away from the ruins that communicate the possibilities of history. The article calls for a revisiting of women's unnamable wounds for a response to the decay of an existing paradigm such as Takeda's sekai.
The writings of Tawada Yoko are known for their surrealist, dream-like aesthetics that challenge ... more The writings of Tawada Yoko are known for their surrealist, dream-like aesthetics that challenge notions of transparent language and referential meaning. Nevertheless, in recent years, Tawada's works have increasingly been read for their political significance, especially in relation to issues like migration, gender politics, and eco-criticism. This essay argues that, while Tawada's writings must indeed be seen as characterized by their figurative, non-referential use of language, their very figurations may be read as political. Specifically, it traces the nuanced political implications of the relationships established in Tawada's works between the mutually entangled figures of "language", "human", and "life". For example, I argue that Tawada's work is rightly read as destabilizing the hierarchies of species-difference that would privilege "human" for its unique capacity for language and symbolization. Nevertheless, Tawada seems to insist that, by virtue of that very same capacity for language, symbolization, and the figurative itself, the subject of human must never disavow its complicity in a fundamental violence against other humans and planetary life itself.
in Still Hear the Wound: Toward an Asia, Politics, and Art to Come. Ed. Chonghwa Lee, tr. Rebecca... more in Still Hear the Wound: Toward an Asia, Politics, and Art to Come. Ed. Chonghwa Lee, tr. Rebecca Jennison and Brett de Bary, Ithaca: Cornell East Asian Series, 2016.
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Conference Presentations by Junliang Huang
University of Tokyo, Komaba Campus
June 25, 2016
*in Japanese
Talks by Junliang Huang
Papers by Junliang Huang
University of Tokyo, Komaba Campus
June 25, 2016
*in Japanese