[CANCELLED] Representations of Gender and Ethnicity in Postcolonial Korean-Japanese Narratives

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The term Korean-Japanese literature (or zainichi chōsenjin bungaku) designates a range of literary texts written by Koreans who migrated to Japan during the period of the Japanese colonization of Korea (1910-1945) or by their descendants. These texts often deal with topics related to the colonial past and its legacies as well as to the everyday life and struggles of the Korean-Japanese minority in Japan.

This paper explores representations of gender and ethnicity in Korean-Japanese literature from a postcolonial perspective, looking at three narratives from the turn of the century. Saihate no futari (“Two Persons on the Margins”, 1999) by Sagisawa Megumu (1968-2004) and Nason no sora (“The Sky of Nason”, 2001) by Kim Masumi (born 1961) are written by female authors whereas GO (“GO”, 2000) is written by the male author Kaneshiro Kazuki (born 1968).

The analysis of these narratives, embedded in the framework of postcolonial studies, focusses on the following questions: How are gender and ethnic identity formations represented? In what sense are they interrelated to each other? And finally, is postcoloniality presented as a gendered phenomenon, providing different subject positions for males and females?

Maren Haufs-Brusberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Japanese Studies at Trier University and currently a scholarship student at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ). From October onwards she will be a Research Assistant at Heinrich-Heine- University Düsseldorf. Her current PhD project, tentatively titled “Intervowen: Gender and Postcoloniality in Contemporary Korean-Japanese Literature”, is supported by the Stipendienstiftung Rheinland-Pfalz.