The Global Contexts of Zainichi Korean Literature (July 29, 2023)
International Symposium ReportCindi Textor
Assistant Professor, University of Utah (USA)The international symposium held July 29, 2023, “Reading Zainichi Korean Literature
in Global Contexts,” represents a culmination of the Osaka University Global JapaneseStudies Education and Research Incubator supported project “An International
Collaborative Network for Research on Zainichi Korean Literature.” Under theleadership of Nicholas Lambrecht, the project has fostered collaboration andconversation among scholars working across the globe on topics related to Zainichi
Korean literature. It was thanks to the project that I was also able to participate in aJuly 15, 2023 international symposium held at Dongguk University on “Intersectionalityand Zainichi-ness.” Both events advanced the project’s goal of creating a global
network of researchers of Zainichi Korean literature, especially in Korean-, Japanese-,and English-language discourses. At the same time, the collective work of scholars inthis network has shown the importance of transnational and intersectional approaches
to Zainichi Korean literature, situating Zainichi Koreans not simply as a minority within
Japan, but in a global frame. Each of the speakers at the Osaka University symposium
was in some way concerned with this global framing.
The keynote speakers in particular provided fertile ground for thinking through theways that shifts in framing can illuminate or obscure certain voices and histories. Kim
Hwangi’s exciting talk took listeners on a world tour, exploring a burgeoning archive ofKorean literature in diaspora. This included not only Zainichi Korean literature, but
writings by Chosonjok of China, Koryo Saram of Russia and Central Asia, and Koreansin Europe, Australia, and across the Americas. These diasporic literatures exist in
Korean as well as the local languages, offering a rich vein of material through whichto probe questions of migration, nationalism, (post)colonialism, and many others. Next,
Nayoung Aimee Kwon offered a more cautionary approach to the archive, exploring
the many ways that Cold War and post-Cold War American hegemony has excised
certain material from the historical record, or kept those materials out of the hands ofcertain scholars. Both presentations illustrated the urgency of collaboration acrossnational borders, in order to do justice to the expansive yet necessarily incomplete
corpus of narratives by Koreans in Japan and other locations in diaspora.
Panel presentations in the afternoon session took up specific case studies within thebroader landscape laid out by the keynote speakers. My own presentation exploredthe distinction between postcolonial and global Japanophone literatures through theposition of Muslims in Japan in the work of Kim Saryang and Iranian-born novelist
Shirin Nezammafi. I argued that the global and postcolonial are not so easily
disentangled in Japanese-language literature. Hosomi Kazuyuki approached the workof Kim Shijong from a fresh angle, through comparison with the German-language
poet Paul Celan. Reading the two poets side-by-side allowed us to see Kim’s struggle
to mediate historical trauma through language, and to ponder the responsibility ofreaders and interpreters of such language. Finally, Sakasai Akito added crucial context
to the question of why Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko did not garner a response in Japaneselanguage discourse, particularly compared to its popularity and impact in the UnitedStates and South Korea. Sakasai incisively situated Pachinko within a broader waveof Asian American literary and cultural phenomena in the United States, a push for
greater representation of the often-invisible Asian minority that was largely illegible inJapanese-language discourse. The panel contributions were united by an impetus todraw connections across contexts, even—perhaps especially—where national,
historical, or political differences stymy our efforts to draw straightforward conclusions.
In the discussion that followed the formal presentations, there remained a lingering
sense that research on Zainichi literature requires a great deal of specificity. It is inmany ways resistant to our efforts to situate it within broader contexts—the aim of thissymposium and much of the contemporary scholarship on Zainichi literature andculture. The language politics vis-à-vis Japanese, the divided homeland, and manyother factors create thorny issues for positioning Zainichi literature within global
Korean literature in diaspora, Japanophone literature, or any larger framework wemight choose. Still, as the ideas emerging from this event demonstrate, there is ample
value in rising to those challenges. I look forward to continuing to build an international
network of researchers committed to this mission.