Harding, Andrew2021-12-202021-08Harding_cornellgrad_0058F_12609http://dissertations.umi.com/cornellgrad:12609https://hdl.handle.net/1813/110559219 pagesThis thesis examines the production and re-production of “Zainichi” – formerly colonized Korean subjects still residing in Japan after 1945 – as a rhetorical figure in postwar Japan. Beginning with an analysis of official state rhetoric, academic discourse, and literary criticism, I contend that this figure has assumed an important rhetorical function in the assertion of Japan’s post-coloniality and, consequently, of the nation’s success in distancing itself from its colonial past. As a touchstone of historical progress, I argue that the postwar figure of Zainichi exhibits a formal and functional continuity with the pre-war rhetorical figure of the colonized Korean, which played an important role in asserting Japan’s cultural exceptionalism as the sole “world culture” in Asia. Because of the important role the figure of Zainichi has played in the assertion of a Japanese national self-image, fiction written by Zainichi Koreans has often been read within a very particular reading practice, in which its relation to the canon of Japanese national literature and literary language has provided the principle lens of analysis. In being read as a borderline case – which is to say, as a cultural product against which the limits of the Japanese national subject might be measured – I argue that “Zainichi literature” has often been read as the product of a subjective experience assumed to lie beyond the limits of the Japanese national subject. This assumption has only been compounded by the hegemonic rise of ethno-national discourse in both Japan and Korea; the result of both postcolonial ressentiment and the ideological divisions of the Cold War. With ethno-nationalism so often construed as the only ethical response to the violence of the Pan-Asian project, “Zainichi” fiction has often been read as a lamentable exile-fiction. As a result, any potential commentary regarding the inevitable breakdown of national and ethnic categories following the colonial project has been effectively muted. I then provide readings of texts by three Zainichi Korean authors – Ri Kaisei, Yi Yang-ji, and Yang Sok-il – whose fiction attends to the postwar as an historically unprecedented landscape, rather than as the reconstitution of an assumed pre-colonial status quo.enAttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International"Minority" fictionEast Asian postcolonialityNational identityPostwar JapanTwentieth century Japanese fictiondissertation or thesishttps://doi.org/10.7298/3k0q-2997