Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan Kindle Edition
by Nayoung Aimee Kwon (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
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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 collaboration 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.
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"Nayoung Aimee Kwon's examination of Korean authors during the Japanese imperial period is a richly theorized, sensitive, and engaging work of literary and colonial history."--Denis Gainty "History: Reviews of New Books" (11/1/2016 12:00:00 AM)
"Kwon's book will become an instant classic of the postcolonial theory approach to colonial Korea's literary scene."--Janet Poole "Journal of Asian Studies" (5/1/2016 12:00:00 AM)
"Besides many compelling analyses and arguments made in Intimate Empire, plentiful visual materials provide us a fascinating glimpse into the cultural fields in the empire.... it is a great contribution to the scholarship on colonial culture and imperialism for its exemplary handling of archives and its succinct arguments made based on comparative readings of texts. It is an essential text for researchers of colonial literature, transcultural colonial exchange, cultural fields in wartime Japan, and translation."--Jooyeon Rhee "Acta Koreana" (6/1/2016 12:00:00 AM)
"Intimate Empire is a most welcome addition to transcultural scholarship on East Asian literatures and cultures and sets an excellent example for future research on imperialism in East Asia and well beyond."--Karen Thornber "Pacific Affairs" (12/12/2016 12:00:00 AM)
"Intimate Empire establishes critical questions for historians to ponder, beginning with: Who writes the empire? How does the language they use matter? Kwon has demonstrated many pathways into, as well as offered new and alternate routes for, future discovery."--Alexis Dudden "American Historical Review" (3/6/2017 12:00:00 AM)
About the Author
Nayoung Aimee Kwon is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University.
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ASIN : B0116WU6O0
Publisher : Duke University Press Books
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Publication date : 17 July 2015
Language : English
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Intimate empire : collaboration and colonial modernity in Korea and Japan / Nayoung Aimee Kwon
Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan
NAYOUNG AIMEE KWON
Duke University Press Durham and London 2015
Intimate empire : collaboration and colonial modernity in Korea and Japan / Nayoung Aimee Kwon.
Cover credit: Kim Saryang’s postcard correspondence from Tokyo to Korean author Ch’oe Chŏnghŭi, reprinted with permission from Mr. Kim Jihoon of the estate of Ch’oe Chŏnghŭi. Originally published in Kim Yŏngsik, ed., Chakko munin 48-in ŭi yukp’il sŏhanjip Pa’in Kim Tonghwan 100-chunyŏn kinyŏm. Minnyŏn, 2001.
For my parents, Myung Hae Jun and Yong Sam Kwon
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
On Naming, Romanization, and Translations xiii
1 Colonial Modernity and the Conundrum of Representation 1
2 Translating Korean Literature 17
3 A Minor Writer 41
4 Into the Light 59
5 Colonial Abject 80
6 Performing Colonial Kitsch 99
7 Overhearing Transcolonial Roundtables 131
8 Turning Local 154
9 Forgetting Manchurian Memories 174
10 Paradox of Postcoloniality 195
Notes 213
Bibliography 247
Index 263
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
From conception to completion, this book has taken over a decade to write while in transit among three countries and stumbling across three languages. Along the way, I have been sustained by the generosity of many individuals, and I am indebted to the hospitality of those who have kindly opened up their homes, classrooms, libraries, collections, and conversations to this itinerant’s many comings and goings.
First, my teachers at ucla guided me from the beginning: Peter H. Lee, John B. Duncan, Namhee Lee, Seiji M. Lippit, Jinqi Ling, and the late Miriam Silverberg. This book could not have been conceived or realized without their intellectual rigor and generosity of spirit through the years. Friends from graduate school days supported me as fellow travelers and co-conspirators at various stages of the journey: Takushi Odagiri, Chiyoung Kim, Jennifer Shin, Mickey Hong, Seung- Ah Lee, Yingzi Stella Xu, Charles Kim, Sonja Kim, John Namjun Kim, Min-S uh Son, Hijoo Son, Ellie Choi, Todd Henry, Koichi Haga, Youngju Ryu, Chris Hanscom, and Jinsoo An. I thank Hyaeweol Choi for the opportunity to teach at Arizona State University and the wonderful colleagues there for their warm hospitality during my stay.
In Korea, I am grateful to Kwon Youngmin for welcoming me to Seoul National University. Kim Chul and Lee Kyounghoon kindly allowed me to join their seminars and collaboratives at Yonsei University. One of the most influential was Hanil munhak yŏnguhoe (aka Suyohoe), which became my home away from home in Seoul. Other teachers and friends
I continue to learn from include Sin Hyŏng-g i, Seo Jae-k il, Cha Seung-k i, Baek Moonim, Kwŏn Myŏnga, Jung Jaewon, Tajima Tetsuo, Kim Yerim, Pak Hana, Yi Hwajin, Choe Yŏngsŏk, Chŏng Chonghyŏn, Kim Chaeyŏng, Makase Akiko, Hwang Hoduk, Yi Yŏngjae, Kim Chaeyong, and Chung Kŭnsik. I thank each of them for ongoing dialogues.
In Japan, I thank Hotei Toshihiro for kindly hosting me at Waseda University. In Tokyo, I have also been the beneficiary of the teaching and friendship of Ōmura Masuo, Sim Wŏnsŏp, Kim Ŭngyo, Nam Bujin, Kwak Hyoungduck, Pak Hŭibyŏng, Cho Kiŭn, and Fujiishi Takayo. I would like to thank Yonetani Masafumi and the graduate students at Gaidai, and Kawamura Minato and his graduate students at Hōsei University for making me feel welcome in their seminars. Watanabe Naoki and friends at Inmun P’yŏngnon Yŏnguhoe deserve special gratitude: this became yet another home away from home when in Tokyo.
Shirakawa Yutaka has been a thoughtful supporter of my work. I would like to especially thank him for graciously sharing ideas and resources, including rare photographs, and for introducing me to the Noguchi family who have so kindly made available their stories and personal collections to me. In Kyoto, I continue to be inspired by Mizuno Naoki for his intellectual generosity and rigor. I also thank Matsuda Toshihiko at Nichibunken for kindly sharing his expertise on colonial era police records.
At Duke, I could not have wished for a more supportive group of colleagues and friends to accompany me at the final stretch of this journey. I would like to thank the Franklin Humanities Institute for sponsoring my manuscript workshop and to all the participants for their rigorous and careful reading of the manuscript: David Ambaras, Leo Ching, Kyeong-H ee Choi, Eileen Chow, Hae-Y oung Kim, Reed Malcolm, Ellen McLarney, Walter Mignolo, and Naoki Sakai. I am especially grateful to Naoki Sakai, Kyeong-H ee Choi, and Reed Malcolm, for traveling from far away, and for their thoughtful comments, criticism, and encouragement at this crucial junction. Ellen and Eileen also deserve special mention for being the best writing team, cheering me toward the finish line. I thank miriam cooke, Shai Ginsburg, Gennifer Weisenfeld, Guo-J uin Hong, Carlos Rojas, Rey Chow, Hwansoo Kim, Eunyoung Kim, and Cheehyung Kim for their continued guidance and friendship. I am grateful to several people who have read all or parts of the manuscript and offered their insights at crucial stages: Takashi Fujitani, Jin-K yung Lee, Theodore Hughes,
x • acknowledgments
and Jonathan Abel. I thank library specialists Kris Troost, Luo Zhuo, and Miree Ku for their research expertise. Special thanks to Elizabeth Brown for her careful and incisive editing and warm encouragement in preparing an early draft. J. Rappaport expertly added the final touches at the last stage of production.
The research, writing, and publication were generously supported through grants from Fulbright- Hays, the Fulbright iie, the Korea Foundation, Duke University Arts and Sciences, the Andrew W. Mellon/Franklin Humanities Institute, the Asian Pacific Studies Institute, the Triangle Center for Japanese Studies, and the Office of the Dean of the Humanities.
Parts of chapters 1 and 2 appeared in an earlier version as “Colonial Modernity and the Conundrum of Representation: Korean Literature in the Japanese Empire,” in Postcolonial Studies 13, n0 .4 (2010): 421–3 9. An earlier version of chapter 5 was published as “Conflicting Nostalgia: Performing The Tale of Ch’unhyang (春香傳) in the Japanese Empire,” in Journal of Asian Studies, 73, no. 1 (February 2014): 113– 41.
The following individuals and institutions were instrumental in securing images and permissions: Chung Wha Lee Iyengar, from the estate of Yi Kwangsu, and Hatano Setsuko for help acquiring rare photos of Yi Kwangsu; Liu Chih-F u, from the estate of Long Yingzong, with special thanks to Wang Huei-C hen and Shin Ji-Y oung, for their help accessing a copy of a rare correspondence between Kim Saryang and Long Yingzong; Jihoon Kim from the estate of Ch’oe Chŏnghŭi for permission to reprint rare postcard correspondences. I would also like to acknowledge the archivists at Seoul National University Rare Book Archives; Waseda University Archives; Tsubouchi Shōyō Memorial Museum; Ōhara Institute for Social Research, Hōsei University; and Meiji Gakuin Archives of History.
At Duke University Press, I thank Ken Wissoker for having faith in the project and for his grace and expertise in shepherding it through the various hurdles, and Elizabeth Ault and Sara Leone for their professionalism and guidance in the final stages of the publication process.
Finally, my family is my anchor, and I cannot adequately express my appreciation for their constant love, encouragement, and patience. It is with boundless love and gratitude that I dedicate this book to my parents, Myung Hae Jun and Yong Sam Kwon, whose paths as teachers I myself have embarked upon, and whose lifelong love of books, I have inherited: 감사합니다.
acknowledgments • xi
ON NAMING, ROMANIZATION, AND
TRANSLATIONS
Naming is a complex matter in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Many proper names can be read or rendered in multiple ways in K orean, Japanese, and variant hybrid forms. When we take into account pseudonyms, pen names, colonial name changes, and so forth, each name holds yet more multiplicities. For example, the author Chang Hyŏkchu is also known as Chō Kakuchū, Noguchi Kakuchū, Noguchi Minoru, and so on. Following one convention with consistency for all names would have been impossible in this book, and while variants are introduced at times, I have often chosen one rendering per author to reduce confusion.
Romanization of words from Korean, Japanese, and Chinese follow the McCune Reischauer, Hepburn, and Pinyin systems respectively. Exceptions were made when more commonly known conventions are available (e.g., Seoul or Tokyo), or in cases when authors have expressed alternative preferences. Japanese and Korean terms are sometimes given together with corresponding initials J and K respectively. Proper names for authors who publish primarily in Asian languages follow cultural conventions of given names following surnames. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
ONE COLONIAL MODERNITY AND THE CONUNDRUM OF REPRESENTATION
In embarking on an examination of the contentious and divided modern histories of Korea and Japan, we might do worse than begin with the following: a small story just seven short pages, long forgotten but significant, of their once shared literary past. The Japanese-l anguage short story “Aika” (Love?) appears with a byline of a colonial Korean author, Yi Pogyŏng, who is labeled as a “Korean exchange student” (Kankoku ryūgakusei). We now know that this story was penned on the eve of Japan’s colonization of Korea by none other than Yi Kwangsu (1892–1 950?)—the father of modern Korean literature. In the following decades, as Korea was becoming more deeply subsumed into Japan after being demoted to colonial status, Yi Kwangsu (Pogyŏng was his given name) would soon become one of the most prominent and contested colonial writers in the Japanese empire. Yi wrote “Aika” in Japanese as a student studying abroad in the imperial metropolitan center of Tokyo. His travels paralleled the journey toward “enlightenment,” what Edward Said elsewhere calls the “voyage-i n,”1 of so many of his colonial counterparts from around the world into the heart of empire. Yi affectionately called “Aika” his “maiden work” (ch’ŏnyŏjak), a melancholy story about the unrequited homoerotic desire of a Korean schoolboy Bunkichi/Mungil for his Japanese classmate Misao.2 The story was penned nervously in the formative years by the young boy who would quickly rise to
Fig. 1.1 Yi Kwangsu’s “Aika” from Shirogane gakuhō. Reprinted from Meiji Gakuin Archives of History.
fame as the “father of modern Korean literature” and then seemingly just as quickly fall infamously as a traitorous colonial collaborator (even changing his name to the Japanese Kayama Mitsurō). This rise and fall of Yi Kwangsu or his journey toward becoming Kayama Mitsurō is still contested and little understood, and the story “Aika” takes us back to a primal scene of scandalous confluences in Korea and Japan’s contested colonial encounter at the turn of the twentieth century.
After wavering impotently in the dark, hovering at the threshold of the
2 • chapter 1
Fig. 1.2 Table of Contents for Shirogane gakuhō lists Yi as a “Korean Exchange Student.” Reprinted with permission from Meiji Gakuin Archives of History.
guesthouse where Misao lodges, Bunkichi/Mungil wonders anxiously to himself whether Misao would reciprocate his affections:
Bunkichi/Mungil went to visit Misao in Shibuya. Joy and pleasure and boundless hope filled his breast. Stopping along the way to visit one or two other friends had only been a pretext. Night was falling, and the street was becoming hard to see. But Bunkichi/Mungil was determined to make
Fig. 1.3 Students and teachers at Meiji Gakuin. Yi Kwangsu is standing in the last row to the far left. Reprinted with permission from the Meiji Gakuin Archives of History. Special thanks to Professor Hatano Setsuko for sharing a copy of this photo.
Fig. 1.4 Students and teachers at Meiji Gakuin. Yi Kwangsu is the third from the right in the second row from the top. Reprinted with permission from the Meiji Gakuin Archives of History. Special thanks to Professor Hatano Setsuko for sharing a copy of this photo.
his way to Misao. . . . He passed through the gate and walked toward the entrance. His heart was beating even faster and his body was shaking. The storm door was shut and everything was deathly quiet. Maybe he’s asleep already. No, that can’t be. It’s only a little past nine. It’s the middle of exams, there’s no way he’d be in bed already. It must be that out here they lock up early. Should I knock? Someone’s sure to come to the door if I do. . . . But Bunkichi/Mungil was unable to stir. He held his breath and just stood like a wooden statue. Why? Why did he come all this way only to find himself unable to make a move? It wasn’t that he thought he’d get into trouble if he knocked, or that he stopped his raised fist at the last second; he simply did not have the courage. Right now Misao must be hitting the books hard for his exams. He would never dream that I am standing here now. There are only two thin walls between us, but our thoughts are a million miles apart. What should I do? All that expectation and joy melted like spring snow.
Do I give up and just leave like this? Despair and pain tightened Bunkichi/ Mungil’s chest. He turned around and began to tiptoe away.3
The conflicted emotions contending within Bunkichi/Mungil’s solitary soliloquy is noteworthy. After much agonizing, he remains stiff and “unable to stir,” in an impasse to decide one way or another and “make a move.” The thin wall renders his love so close, yet so far away (seemingly “a million miles away”), and exacerbates his impossible longing. Powerless to endure the silence from the absent object of his desire, Bunkichi/Mungil finally turns back, alone and dejected. The story ends with him laying himself down on train tracks, tearfully awaiting the train to speed by and put an end to his lonesome misery.
Despite its long absence from their literary histories, this story is remarkable for both modern Korean and Japanese literatures, in form and content, textually and meta- textually.4 Loosely based on snippets of the writer’s own life, it was written in the imperial language of Japanese in the metropolitan form of the “I- novel,” a fictionalized, self- conscious, confessional narrative that would become the canonical form in modern Japanese literature.5 It also prefigures important themes in the rise of modern Korean literature, not the least with Bunkichi/Mungil’s final lament, “stars are heartless” (hoshi wa mujō da) which anticipates Yi’s later masterpiece, Mujŏng (The heartless), which would inaugurate a national canon and be considered the first modern novel of Korea.6
Such confluences of cultures between Korea and Japan (especially but not limited to their literatures) have long been evaded in both postcolonial nation- states.7 Although Yi would subsequently grow up to become one of the most
prominent figures (not only in colonial Korea, but in the Japanese empire at large), this work—like other Japanese-l anguage writings by former colonized subjects—was long forgotten after the abrupt collapse of the empire in 1945, in both Japan and Korea. Only in 1981 would it become available in Korean translation.8 In Japan, it would not be published in an anthology on postcolonial literature until 1996, almost a century after it was first written.9
Intimate Empire examines the broader significance of such intimately shared but disavowed colonial pasts in the modern histories of Korea and Japan and their contested legacies in the Asia-P acific. “Disavowal” here means the ambivalent and unstable play of recognition and denial.10 While I begin with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic senses of the concept, I am more interested in how it translates to the social context of imperialism. The secret desire for the colonial Other in this story hints at the unspeakable nature of such colonial intimacies that have yet to be fully recognized or reckoned with in the postcolonial aftermath. The imperial encounter as a discomforting scene of desire (coexisting, yet with repulsion) has become familiar from other globally translated and documented colonial contexts, for instance, from Europe’s empires. The works of those who have become luminaries of the postcolonial canon, such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Marguerite D uras, Jacques Derrida, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Salman Rushdie, and many others, are wrought with famous scenes of colonial miscegenation and the resulting anxieties. Although ubiquitous in narratives of Europe’s encounters with its colonial Others, these contact zones of transcolonial misogyny still remain some of the most troubling and conceptually difficult aspects of colonization to address in postcolonial reckonings (I will return to this ubiquitous challenge in chapter 10.
The homoerotic tension in “Aika” further alludes to the particular complexity of the imperial history of Japan and the rigorous policies of assimilation (in language, culture, and political affiliation) of intimate Asian neighbors like Korea, with centuries of proximate and shared cultures and histories. Japan’s ultimate goal was the formation of imperial subjects for wartime and imperial expansions into the “Rest” of Asia in what was couched as a mutual struggle against Western imperialism. In Korea (and to a lesser degree, in Taiwan), the goal was said to become one with Japan, as exemplified in the slogan Naisen ittai (内鮮一体, Japan and Korea, One Body).
However, such a Pan- Asianist impulse was always self- divided and self- contradictory. It involved the simultaneous production and consumption of the colonized as same and yet different. This contradiction undergirds all colonizing endeavors but took on a particular valence in the experience of colonizing proximate neighbors who were already closely affiliated—geographically, culturally, historically, and ethnically—long before the fact of colonial penetration. In such a case, the always already unstable divide between the colonizers and the colonized had to be managed closely. The production and consumption of colonial identification on the one hand and differentiation on the other wavered throughout the colonial period, depending on the empire’s shifting needs and policies within constantly changing degrees of regional and global liaisons of affiliations.
In this context, many prominent colonial intellectuals, like Yi Kwangsu, were actively and rigorously mobilized for imperial agendas, and many even internalized the desire to “become Japanese” in order to overcome racial discrimination in the imperial hierarchy.11 The story “Aika” anticipates the challenges raised by the life and works of Yi Kwangsu and many other prominent figures within modern Korean history and culture. It is difficult for Koreans to reconcile Yi’s prominence as both a patriotic nationalist leader and a traitorous pro-J apanese collaborator. How does a postcolonial nation come to terms with the paradox of these seemingly incompatible and mutually exclusive, and yet intimately coexisting characteristics in someone who played such an influential role in the construction of modern Korean art and society? Yi went from penning The Heartless, the aforementioned first “modern Korean novel” about patriotic national reconstruction, and a draft of the declaration of independence demanding freedom from Japanese rule, to actively leading the way in espousing the assimilation of Korea into Japan (Naisen ittai) by the era’s end. However, in postcolonial Japan, the artistic endeavors of colonized subjects like Yi, who had been pressured to stand before the public at the forefront of imperial policies, were completely erased from its history.12 The story “Aika” and Yi’s own life, along with the lives of countless other significant colonial- era figures from Korea, inscribed conflicting desires of the colonized in their collusion (voluntary or coerced) with the colonizers that neither side wanted to remember in the postcolonial aftermath.
At the height of the Japanese empire (1895– 1945) and especially after the so-called Manchurian Incident of 1931,13 colonial Koreans were rigorously assimilated and mobilized to cooperate with Japan’s imperial expansions. The Korean language was increasingly censored and a rising number of colonial Korean intellectuals were educated in Japan, wrote in Japanese, and collaborated with the Japanese in order to produce cultural works and have their voices heard. Japanese-l anguage writings and translations by colonized Koreans were at the forefront of cultural debates in both Japan and Korea. However, immediately following the empire’s collapse in 1945, the writers and their works were put on trial (literally and figuratively) and their very existence was repressed in divided national discourses for over half a century.
This book examines the rise and repression of this controversial body of writings by colonized subjects at the contact zones of empire, and the ways in which these writings have reverberated since. The objects of inquiry are the writings of those who were on the front lines of cultural debates during one of the most contested and least understood moments of the colonial encounter between Korea and Japan, as well as the colonial and postcolonial debates surrounding them. Many of the works considered here have been defined within the rhetoric of colonial assimilation (Naisen ittai, Japan and Korea, One Body) during the colonial period and then in the postcolonial aftermath, as a literature of collaboration (ch’inil munhak, 親日文学), where ch’inil literally means “intimacy” or “collusion” with Japan. Rather than relying on such binary notions of assimilation versus differentiation (during the colonial period), or collaboration versus resistance (in later postcolonial assessments), this book proposes that we need to reframe the scandalous confluence of cultures under imperialism, as embodied by these texts, within a more historical term of intimacy. In this reformulation, the term “intimacy” is historically derived and translated from both the colonial-e ra rhetoric of Naisen ittai and the postcolonial rhetoric of ch’inil. This critical move allows us to cut across the impasses of imperial and nationalist binary rhetoric to redefine intimacy as an unstable play of affects informed by desire, longing, and affection—all of which coexisted with the better-k nown violence and coercion undergirding empire. This unstable play of affects was violently elided post- 1945, when the rigid colonizer/colonized binary came to the fore as the organizing framework of re-m embering colonial history on the Korean peninsula in Korea and Japan. Furthermore, redefining colonial collaboration as the uncanny coexistence of desire (or intimacy) along with coercion (and violence) at the scene of the colonial encounter also signifies broader impasses of the ambivalent experiences of colonial modernity.
In recent decades, pioneering scholars have begun an earnest examination of colonial modernity. In the case of East Asian studies, for example, Tani Barlow and a team of collaborators inaugurated one of today’s most influential Anglophone journals on East Asian cultural productions by way of thinking through this problematic (positions, issue 1). This and other contributions, both coeval and subsequent, such as the later anthology Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, as well as Colonial Modernity in Korea (coedited by Gi-W ook Shin and Michael Robinson), stand at the forefront of a broad transnational outgrowth of scholarship wrestling with precisely what is meant by this suggestive but elusive term. For example, Shin and Robinson expressly declined to define colonial modernity at this early stage, leaving it open so as to encourage further transnational dialogue. Joining the ongoing conversation of many scholars who subsequently have been inspired by and have been building upon these important contributions, Intimate Empire proposes to reconsider this problem of colonial modernity as a “shared but disavowed” conundrum of modernity experienced in colonial subjection.
“Colonial modernity” is a paradoxical concept that is difficult to pin down. Komagome Takeshi points to the “ambiguity” of colonial modernity, its exact meaning often depending on the individual writer evoking the term.14 This difficulty is further compounded because of its ironic resemblance to the imperial apologist rhetoric of colonial modernization (Ch’ŏn Chŏnghwa, Yonetani Masafumi, Yun Haedong, and others).15 This book does not conceive that the condition of modernity in the non-W est is a priori different from or alternative to that of the West in its empirical conditions. Instead, it takes as self-e vident with many others (Fredric Jameson, Walter Mignolo, Arjun Appardurai, Gayatri Spivak, Leo Ching, Rey Chow, Yun Haedong) that modernity is a globally shared condition, coeval and ushered in by worldwide shifts wrought by the uneven global dispersion of capitalism.16 It is, however, important to note that this unevenly shared predicament of modernity resulted in significant differences in the ways modernity was experienced by those who were defined as if they were in development and in need of catching up by external standards. Walter Mignolo has diagnosed the problem of coloniality as the constitutive “darker side of modernity,” as its unacknowledged but intimate counterpart. Likewise, this book argues that the paradox of colonial modernity emerges not because there exists an internal contradiction between coloniality and modernity, but from the fact that such a contradiction was produced and imposed discursively and continues to undermine our understanding of the true intimacy between coloniality and modernity. What are actually constitutive and coeval (coloniality and modernity) have been discursively and hegemonically severed and forced into a contradictory relationship (psychically and politically) as if they were incompatible and not coeval. This rhetorical move had dire consequences for those lives most burdened by it; those experiences of the colonized that were relegated into a forever distant place and time in the hierarchy of the modern world order (see Fabian, Time and the Other).
In this book, I narrowly redefine colonial modernity as the experience of modernity in colonial subjection, whether through actual colonial domination or the hegemonic power and occupation of the West, both real and imagined (psychic, political, economic, militaristic, territorial, etc.). Colonial modernity is defined as a disavowed conundrum shared between the colonizer and the colonized in Korea and Japan, and more broadly shared throughout the non- West, with troubling implications for postcolonial legacies into the present. Reframing our understanding of colonial modernity thus further allows us to think through intimate yet unexamined connections between the paradox of colonial modernity and the paradox of postcoloniality, as will be further examined in chapter 10.
This book considers the devastating implications of such disavowed yet intimate histories for the lived experience of the colonial modern subject and their legacies. The refusal to recognize the modernity of his or her experience violently imposed impasses and antinomies deep into the fabric of that life. The fundamental contradiction or impasse that the colonial modern subject was forced to negotiate on various levels, bodily, psychically, linguistically, and politically, is characterized in this book as a “conundrum of representation.” This conundrum of representation of the colonial modern subject will be examined using the case study of a body of imperial-l anguage texts by colonized cultural producers. These texts reflect the condition of modernity lived in the shadows of both direct colonial rule (by Japan in the case of Korea) as well as the omnipresent threat of Western imperialism (for both Korea and Japan). These are in essence (both literally and metaphorically) translated or self-d ivided representations emerging out of the social context of colonial unevenness, in which colonial cultural producers—artists and writers, for example—necessarily and strategically were compelled to borrow the language of the hegemonic imperial Other in an attempt to voice themselves and to have the Self heard at the imperial discursive table in the language of that imperial Other.
The conundrum of representation via the imperial language of the colonial modern experience translates, mimics, and illuminates anew what has become a truism to characterize the modern experience at large as a “crisis of representation.” This so-called universal crisis was said to arise from “the challenge of representing new content, the historical experiences of the modern world, in the context of changing social norms about the status of art and literature themselves.” In practice, this is said to have produced works of art and literature that displayed formal characteristics such as fragmentation, stream of consciousness, anxiety, and atomization, and thus revealing a lack of faith in language to represent “reality as is.”17 However, such a characterization was never meant to recognize the experiences of the colonial modern subject who is often relegated to the status of a mere object in canonical texts. In response, there have been numerous important interventions to document the coevalness in the modernist forms produced by non- Western artists. For example, Seiji Lippit’s Topographies of Japanese Modernism and the anthology Modanizumu (edited by William J. Tyler) have examined the case of Japanese modernism; Leo Ou- Fan Lee’s Shanghai Modern and Lure of the Modern by Shu- mei Shih examine the Chinese case; and more recently Theodore Hughes’s Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea and Christopher Hanscom’s The Real Modern consider the case of Korea. Following such important endeavors, this book asks: how would characterizations of artistic content and form translate across the imperial divide when we put the politics of the imperial language and translation at the center of the colonial modern impasse?
In other words, what is meant by the conundrum of representation here is both inspired by and translates beyond this oft- cited truism in modernity studies at large which, because of their myopic tendency toward a Western- centric view of modernism, elaborate a universal “crisis of representation” that is more about the psycholinguistic reaction to representing the fractured existence of modern life than to the geopolitical circumstances that might have grounded such a fracture in the first place. There have been numerous deconstructive critiques from within studies of European modernisms and their inherent blind spots, following such pioneering contributions as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Said’s Culture and Imperialism, and Jameson’s Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature. This book joins these discussions to consider the intersection of modernity studies with postcolonial studies toward another path for understanding representations arising out of the modern experience of the colonized, which are to be sure just as fragmented, atomized, and rife with anxious stream of consciousness as are the works of Western colonizers, but which necessarily take on specific and salient forms (form and content) for the colonial modern subject such as Korean writers and their Japanese counterparts at the colonial contact zones in the shadows of Western standards of value.
For the “Rest” who were modern but were denied full recognition as such in the hegemonic but all- too provincial logic that equated modernity with the West, modernity was a self- contradictory experience.18 In this Eurocentric discourse, modernity itself was colonized and accepted as the purview of the West, and then “exported” to colonial Korea and semi- imperial Japan,19 and elsewhere in the non-W est. An instilled sense of the self as “belated” and “lacking” vis- à-vis a standard or value system set elsewhere—the self perceived and experienced as Other—is central to the colonial modern experience of the global majority, though never acknowledged as authentically modern in hegemonic discourses. This happens in degrees, infecting in concentric circles outward from imperial centers into the “non- West”; likewise, the “West” is not one. Dipesh Chakrabarty, in Provincializing Europe, for example, argues for the need to deconstruct Europe from within and without. Naoki Sakai’s ongoing interventions interrogating essentialism in multiple languages have been important (Translation and Subjectivity and Traces). Roberto Dainotto in Europe in Theory has critiqued the internal dynamics behind the formations of Others within Europe. In the Japanese empire, this sense of belatedness or Otherness is shared by both the colonized (Korea) and the colonizer (Japan), aligning and complicating the colonial binary relationship, in ways dissimilar to dynamics more common in the dominant European empires.
The conundrum of representation for the colonial modern subject is mani fold:
1. Conundrum of (modern) subjectivity: The subjectivity and agency of the colonized become paradoxical as the requisite membership to the bounded nation-s tate (with its privileges) is stripped away from the colonized subject. The conundrum consists foremost in being modern yet being denied, not only discursively but institutionally and systemically, the most fundamental “rights” of modern subjecthood. Since the modern subject is invariably linked to the nation- state form, for those living under the threat or actuality of colonization, or the related predicaments of occupation, exile, and so forth, the lack or the constant fear of losing this requisite nation-s tate status through colonial subjection causes tremendous anxiety, collectively and individually.
2. Conundrum of language: In addition to the universal inability to represent reality as is through language, the colonial modern experience is further burdened by the coercive lure of the normative universality of the imperial language. For the colonial modern subject, the mother tongue is always an Other. In Monolingualism of the Other, Jacques Derrida begins a powerfully personal indictment starting at the scene of coloniality from the position of a postcolonial subject; however, he regrettably ends his musings by subsuming the predicament of the m(other) tongue into an amorphously broad “Universal” condition. I would like to keep in mind
the earlier parts of his critique and extend its relevance to the colonial modern subject’s constant need to translate the self as well as broader concepts into and from imperial cultures. Furthermore, the question of language is intimately connected to the question(s) of subjectivity and history.
3. Conundrum of history: For those relegated to the “waiting room of history” (those without history, according to Hegel), the question of who speaks for and passes down these histories has been wrought in controversy from the colonial to the postcolonial eras (Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe). As unbelievable as it may seem, the modernity and the “timeliness” of the colonized and the formerly colonized, once deemed belated and lacking, are still being contested today.20
4. Conundrum of aesthetic representation of form and content: Violent metaphors of deracination, transplantation, and devouring inundate the anxiety of influence experienced by the colonized in their encounter with mighty empires. The pressure to translate native content into Western forms is tremendous and has continued long after the end of formal colonial rule. The tension between viewing art as an expression of the self or viewing it as a collective representative continues to haunt the artistic productions of the colonized and the formerly colonized. It is worth pointing out that such anxieties rarely plague those self-s ituated in civilizational centers. For example, the modernist artists and writers centering themselves within the West blithely borrowed “primitive” forms and content not only without anxiety but also without any qualms about whether to give credit where due. In the colonial modern experience, the questions of translating form and content become even more complex since the self is often perceived as Other. There is a deeply self-c onscious sense of alienation that emerges from the problem of translating the self as Other for an imperial or world audience in the hegemonic language of the Other.
5. Conundrum of recognition: Philosophical, civilizational, ethical, and political questions are implicated in the failure to accord recognition to the colonial modern experience as representations of human effort on multiple levels. The history of the global failure to account for these experiences persists from the colonial to the postcolonial, although involving different degrees of disavowal.
In his essay “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,”
Edward Said critiques prior claims to universality and links the declining legitimacy of Eurocentric perspectives to what he in turn calls the “crisis of modernism.”21 He locates the origins of this crisis not in universal artistic formalism, but in the ethical, political, and historical failures of hegemonic Eurocentric narratives. Said argues that these narratives that have claimed to represent universal modern experiences have utterly failed to take into account the humanity of [Europe’s] various Others. This glaring neglect, he charges, occurred over and over again, despite the fact that the “alterity and difference [which] are systematically associated with strangers, who, whether women, natives, or sexual eccentrics, erupt into vision . . . to challenge and resist settled metropolitan histories, forms, modes of thought.”22 Said critiques willful blindness of such metropolitan narratives as “paralyzed gestures of aestheticized powerlessness,” which assume a “self-c onscious contemplative passivity” and demonstrate the “formal irony of a culture unable to either say yes, we should give up control, or no, we shall hold on regardless.”23 The prevailing reluctance of imperial powers to let go of their empires, territorially and psychically, and the postcolonial implications will be examined in chapter 10.
Unlike many metropolitan canonical texts, in their self-a ssured (although misguided) certainty of their centrality, identity, and self-s ameness, the imperial- language “representations of the colonized” never had the luxury of evading their constitutive imperial landscape, either on the textual or meta- textual levels. The writings of colonized writers who aspired to address the imperial discursive space are painfully marked by the paradoxes and contradictions of empire on every level—from the context of being produced under imperial rule and being consumed across a colonial divide; it is this conundrum of representation that emerged in the barred or disavowed condition of the colonial modern encounter. It is an experience shared across the colonial divide between Japan and Korea as well as by the majority of the world’s population but which has paradoxically been relegated to the devalued status of the particularity of the “minor,” or the minority, that this book proposes to engage. It is a conundrum fully embedded in the violent history of imperial encounters, but one which has been historically marginalized (from local, regional, and global markets, as well as discursive spaces) and only seldom taken seriously as a model or representation of “human effort”—to borrow Said’s phrasing—in the global modern experience.
Taking seriously Said’s critique of collective failures of understanding global modern experiences thus far, this book asks: how then might the modern experience translate differently when refracted through the prism of the perspective of those who had to live through it in colonial subjection? In other words, how might our collectively inherited myopia be illumined otherwise when we actually take into account those Others who have long been absented in prior narratives of modernity, according to Said’s critique? Also, how might familiar key terms from imperial encounters such as “collaboration” and “translation” take on new meanings when they are refracted through the parallax lens of the colonial modern encounter shared between the colonizer and the colonized and whose experiences were both deemed as translations of a Western originary modernity?
Deliberately translating and defamiliarizing universalist claims to modern experience at large, this book argues that the conundrum of representation in imperial-l anguage writings penned by the colonized writer for imperial or metropolitan audiences necessarily arises from a different sort of “self- consciousness” or “aestheticized powerlessness”—one which includes and extends far beyond the issues of literary formalism noted by Said.
Furthermore, this book examines an altogether different type of failure and blindness of insight in the colonial encounter: the inordinate labor of translation of colonial writers, embodied in the unacknowledged efforts of the colonized to translate themselves into the imperial language in an attempt to participate in the imperial discursive space. 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.
The book chapters are organized around select “translated encounters” of transcolonial collaborations between the colonizers and the colonized. The question of “collaboration” is taken away from the binary rhetoric of the empire and nation (Naisen ittai and ch’inil) to reexamine mutual implications at the various scenes of the colonial encounter: the production, consumption, and repression of the so-called literature of collaboration written by colonial Korean writers predominantly in the Japanese- language for imperial audiences; the negotiations of colonial writers in their roles as translators, native informants, or (self-)ethnographers; the examination of such transcolonial coproductions as theatrical performances and roundtable discussions (zadankai, Japanese [hereafter J]; chwadamhoe, Korean [hereafter K]) between the colonizers and the colonized; and the mass media curation and reproduction of translated colonial literature and culture as kitsch objects of colonial collections, or assimilated as sites of imperial “locality” (chihō) in the expanding empire. These various forms and forums of colonial collaborations between the colonizers and the colonized and the history of their rise and repression offer us an essential key to understanding anew broadly shared but disavowed histories and legacies of imperial relations in Japan and Korea, the Asia-P acific, and beyond.
Ultimately, Intimate Empire pays attention to an archive of imperial- language writings by the colonized that have until now been marginalized in local and global theories and discourses on empire and modernity. Taking translation as both an object of inquiry and a tool of critical methodology, this book brings such translated texts into conversation with more familiar metropolitan terms.24
In other words, this case study of Korea’s colonial encounter with Japan is offered not to provide a particular or aberrant example little known by its peripheral geographical location in obscurity and therefore in need of excavation or translation, but rather to reveal what was actively repressed to shed light back on and refract upon the blind spots of the center.25 In paying attention to these hitherto disavowed efforts, this book will illuminate our collective failure to reckon with shared colonial pasts and will document how this failure not only devastated the individual authors and translators but also brought about detrimental national, regional, and global misunderstandings of empires past and present.
NOTES
Chapter 1. Colonial Modernity and the Conundrum of Representation
1. Edward Said describes the “voyage- in” thus: “[It is a] powerful impingement, that is the work of intellectuals from the colonial or peripheral regions who wrote in an imperial language.” Culture and Imperialism, 243. See chapter 3: “Resistance and Opposition,” particularly section 6, “Voyage In and the Emergence of Opposition,” 239– 61. Said is mindful of the moments of resistance and opposition to imperialism produced from its margins. While my focus is on a wide range of complex affects, not necessarily unequivocally resistant or oppositional, at work in the colonial interaction, I hope to open up a space through the critical encounter in which to read these affects oppositionally in order to critique imperial logic.
2. Many personal and place names are rendered simultaneously in Japanese and Korean readings in this book because the Sino- Korean/Japanese characters may be read as either/or. Unless marked by glosses by the author, their indeterminacy in the majority of written texts is significant. The name is glossed as Bunkichi in “Aika” but even in such cases, echoes of plural reading possibilities coexist.
3. The English translation by John Wittier Treat appears as part of a welcome retro-spective on Yi Kwangsu. I have relied on Treat’s masterful translation here with some minor modifications. Yi Kwangsu, “Maybe Love (Ai ka),” in Azalea. This passage is from 321– 22. For the Korean translation, see Yi Kwangsu, “Saranginga,” translated by Kim Yunsik, in Munhak sasang, 442– 46.
4. I discuss intimate textual and metatextual intercourse or interconnections through-out the book. By metatextual intercourse, I am referring to the text’s intimate relationship to extratextual elements beyond the narrative content such as the language and form in which the story was written as well as broader transnational historical contexts and social circumstances within which the text was produced and consumed.
5. The story was published under Yi’s given name, Yi Pogyŏng, in the student coterie journal Shirogane gakuhō of Meiji Gakuin the year before Korea’s annexation by Japan. Yi, “Aika,” 35– 41. I discuss the significance of what I call the “colonized- I- novel” in chapter 3.
6. See Kim, Yi Kwangsu wa kŭ ŭi sidae. See also Treat’s translation, “Maybe Love (Ai ka),” for an excellent rendering into English and for emphasizing this important link. Other themes that will become canonical to modern Korean literature are the anguish of youth as the paradigmatic modern subject; absence of the love object (both allegorically and literally); and the unacknowledged but prevalent connection to Japan and Japanese, in form and content.
7. Throughout the book, I refer to the contentiously shared legacies of Korea and Japan’s colonial relations as “postcolonial.” The concept of the postcolonial is itself contested and paradoxical as pointed out by many. I will defer to chapter 10 a more theoretical engagement with the problems of the postcolonial in East Asia and elsewhere, and here use this term to signify both a temporal aftermath, following the colonial era (post- 1945 in this case) as well as the contending responses to the colonial conditions and ongoing legacies in Korea and Japan.
8. “Saranginga,” translated by Kim Yunsik, in Munhak sasang, 442– 46.
9. Kurokawa, ed., “Gaichi,” no Nihongo bungakusen, vol. 3, 21– 26.
10. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 43– 44; Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho- Analysis, 118–2 1.
11. For a pioneering study on the context of Taiwan, see Ching, Becoming “Japanese.”
12. How do these experiences relate to the erasure of the fates of the so-called comfort women and conscripted soldiers who were mobilized to die for the empire? Writers like Yi Kwangsu were at the forefront of mobilizing soldiers. See Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque, Fujitani, Race for Empire, and Kawashima, The Proletariat Gamble, for nuanced studies about these historical aporias.
13. Also known as the Mukden Incident. On September 18, 1931, the Japanese army staged a bombing of a small area on the South Manchurian Railway near Mukden, and then blamed the Chinese as a pretext to invade northern China. A puppet regime of Manchukuo was subsequently established and, after censure from the global community, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations.
14. Komagome, “Colonial Modernity for an Elite Taiwanese, Lim Bo- Seng.”
15. The Korean- language translation of Shin and Robinson’s aforementioned book is titled Korea’s Colonial Modernity: Beyond Internal Development and Colonial Modernization. Also see Chŏng Yŏnnae, Hanguk kŭndae wa singminji kŭndaehwa nonjaeng. 16. Jameson, Singular Modernity; Appadurai, Modernity at Large; Ching, Becoming “Japanese”; Spivak, Other Asias; Mignolo, Darker Side of Western Modernity; Yun, Singminji kŭndae ŭi p’aerŏdoksŭ.
17. See Lewis, Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, 1– 34.
18. Hall, “The West and the Rest”; Sakai, “Modernity and Its Critique” and “You Asians.”
19. Japan’s ambivalent status in relation to other imperial powers as the sole non- Western imperial power is rendered as semi- imperial, akin to the ambivalent semicolonial status of some colonies in between multiple imperial powers.
214 • notes to chapter 1
20. For a cogent critique, see Harootunian, “ ‘Modernity’ and the Claims of Untimeli-ness,” 367– 82.
21. Said, “Representing the Colonized,” 200, 293– 316, 313.
22. Said, “Representing the Colonized,” 313.
23. Said, “Representing the Colonized,” 315.
24. My aim here is not to impose so-called Western theory on a different world expe-rience in uncritical ways. Yet given the hegemony of theories of modernity which emerge from the Western experience—and the hegemony of Western theory generally—it is as impossible for postcolonial thinkers today to evade these terms and conditions as it was for the colonial subjects with whose thoughts this chapter engages. Rather than reinvent the wheel, however, I seek to retool these theories by putting other global experiences in conversation with and in contention with them—a process that inevitably exposes their limitations and occasional hubris.
25. See, for example, Rey Chow, “Things, Common/Places, Passages of the Port City: On Hong Kong and Hong Kong Author Leung Ping- kwan” on postcolonial Hong Kong.
Chapter 2. Translating Korean Literature
1. Some scholars stress the significance of the year 1937, as it marked Japan’s invasion of China and the implementation of new policies of war mobilization under the Konoe Home Ministry (the first Konoe cabinet was established in June 1937).
Others prefer the year 1938, which marked the launch of Governor General Minami Jirō’s (1874– 1955) increasingly harsh assimilation policies; while others again favor the period from 1939 to the early 1940s, when censorship of Korean- language media intensified, and Japanese- language texts by Koreans rapidly increased in volume.
2. Gaichi, literally means outer territories. It can also be translated as colony, hinter-lands, and so forth.
3. Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea; Yi Yŏn- suk, Kokugo to iu shisō.
4. For Korea, see Paek, Chosŏn sinmunhak sajosa, 398– 99; Im, Ch’inil munhak non; Chŏng, “Yi Kwangsu, Kim Saryang no Nihongo Chōsengo shōsetsu”; Chŏng,
Hanguk kŭndae ŭi singminji ch’ehŏm kwa ijung ŏnŏ munhak; Kim Yunsik, Ilche malgi
Hangguk chakka ŭi Ilbonŏ kŭlssŭgi non; Lee Kyoung- Hoon [Yi Kyŏnghun], Yi
Kwangsu ŭi ch’inil munhak yŏngu; Kim, Chul [Kim Ch’ŏl], Kungmunhak ŭl nŏmŏsŏ; Kim Chaeyong, Hyŏmnyŏk kwa chŏhang; Yun Taesŏk, “1940 nyŏndae ‘kungmin munhak’ yŏngu”; and Yun Taesŏk, Singminji kungmin munhak non.
For Japan, see Im Chŏnhye, Nihon ni okeru Chōsenjin no bungaku no rekishi; and An Usik, Hyōden Kin Shiryō. See also Isogai Jirō and Kuroko Kazuo, eds., Zainichi bungaku zenshū. Some recent literary histories have also begun to deal with resident Korean literature in substantial ways: see, for example, Inoue Hisashi and Komori Yōichi, eds., Zadankai Shōwa bungakushi. Other works that have contributed significantly to the issue are Hayashi Kōji, Zainichi Chōsenjin Nihongo bungakuron; Ōmura Masuo and Hotei Toshihiro, eds., Kindai Chōsen Nihongo sakuhinshū 1901– 1938; Shirakawa Yutaka, “Chang Hyŏkchu yŏngu”; Shirakawa, Shokuminchiki Chōsen no sakka to Nihon; and Nam Pujin, Bungaku no shokuminchishugi.
notes to chapter 2 • 215
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[ Access provided at 19 Jan 2023
from School of Oriental and African Studies ]
Book Revciew
Book Revciew
Intimate Empire: Collaboration & Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan.
By Nayoung Aimee Kwon. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015.
Nayoung Aimee Kwon’s Intimate Empire is a thorough investigation of the ongoing contested colonial legacies shared between Korea and Japan. Unlike the postcolonial disavowal of the colonial past, Kwon earnestly examines and redefines the intimate relationship between the coloniser and the colonised by eloquently elucidating the predicament of Korean colonised writers. Her careful examination of their literary work, whether it be an I-novel, a play or a personal correspondence, sensitively uncovers, chapter by chapter, the complex emotions hidden behind this intimacy.
The chapters tackle many sensitive issues, which include: the rise of repression in both the colony and the metropole; the impossibility of expressing themselves comfortably in the vernacular and the imperial language due to the rigorous assimilation policies enforced by the coloniser; the question of translatability from a mother tongue to a foreign language; the deep anxieties, fear and disdain brought about by the imperial hierarchies; the dichotomy between individual desire and collective representation; and the cultural exchange with the Japanese literary world (Bundan) through a series of roundtable discussions (zadankai) staged and manipulated by the Japanese to serve the needs of the imperial audiences. Their experiences as oppressed colonised writers clearly testify that the Korean colonial reality under Japanese rule was indeed ambivalent, complex, paradoxical, multifaceted and multi-layered. Consequently, Kwon is extremely convincing in challenging postcolonial interpretations, which, by and large, myopically paint Korea’s encounter with its oppressor as one of either collaboration or resistance. Alternatively, Kwon’s assessment offers a new, more nuanced perspective that explains the complex nature of collaboration and intimacy. For example, it is not as simple as Yi Kwangsu (1892-1950) and Chang Hyŏkchu
(1905-1997) being traitorous collaborators of imperial Japan, nor Kang Kyŏngae (1906-1944), a national resistance hero.
Kwon’s criticism of postcolonial discourses is both bold and fair. She goes as far as to assert that the logic of postcolonial Korean nationalists is ironically not so different from that of imperial Japan as they are both detrimental to the understanding of the quintessence of Korean colonial literature, albeit for different reasons. In her analysis, the former demands that colonial texts “represent authentic ‘colonial reality’ which narrowly meant either unequivocal resistance to colonial powers or the sufferings of the colonised under colonial exploitation” while the latter “demand[s] for the authentic representation of the Other which accompanied the erasure of the Other’s full humanity or complexities of experiences” (192). This parallel emphasises the importance of examining colonial legacies objectively—otherwise, the contention which divides Korea and Japan will persist.
Similarly, Kwon offers an interesting insight into the psychological aspect of
Japanese imperialism. She recognises Imperial Japan’s fascination for Koreanness— something exotic and nostalgic—and how it contributed to marginalising and misrepresenting Korean ethnic culture, no matter how “genuine” or “innocent” it may have seemed. By making a close link between the notion of this “colonial kitsch” in the metropole and the assimilation policies in the colony, which are seemingly antithetical to one another (differentiation versus assimilation), she persuasively asserts that they were indeed two sides of the same coin in the context of imperialism, as they both exploited and devalued Korean ethnicity in order to exclusively satisfy the imperial agenda.
This book also discusses the question of colonial modernity in a broader sense. As opposed to modernity developed and embraced in the West, colonial modernity is a more complex and paradoxical concept, which is yet to be recognised and examined comprehensively. Reckoning of colonial modernity is indeed an emotive and uncomfortable issue for all the parties concerned (hence, often the disavowal of the colonial past). As Kwon points out, it is not only exclusive to Korean-Japanese relations—rather, it is highly ubiquitous. In this context, the Western colonial powers have much in common with Japan when facing their former colonial Others.
Kwon then explains the complexities of colonial modernity in Korea. She reminds us that modernity was a foreign concept for both Korea and Japan, but while Japan underwent modernisation of its own accord, Korea experienced it via Japan. The fact that it was imposed by its coloniser, who shared cultural and ethnic affinity, further perplexes the understanding of modernity in Korea.
Japan’s desire and anxieties as a colonial power are also considered carefully in this book. However, Kwon could have perhaps elaborated on it in the broader context of imperial geopolitics after WWI. Japan’s imperial ambition to expand into Manchuria and northern China collided directly with the so-called Washington System, which subscribed to Chinese integrity and the Open Door policy there. Japan challenged and rejected this seemingly “peaceful” system, which prescribed no more new aggression but maintained the status-quo, which essentially meant the colonised continued to be dehumanised. Consequently, by withdrawing from the League of Nations in 1933, Japan ominously decided to go it alone on the international scene. “The threat of the
West” (105) intensified precisely because Japan disagreed with the world order that the West had created. Thus, Japan’s experience as an imperial power, its opportunistic nature and its relationship with the West need to be examined in depth as they directly affected its colonial policies.
In conclusion, we may still not know how to overcome the postcolonial impasse of the contested colonial legacies between Korea and Japan, but Kwon certainly highlights the importance of recognising and addressing it in a more objective, comprehensive perspective. Her work indeed sheds new light not only on Korean and Japanese studies but also on colonial studies both past and present. This book is indeed an essential read for anyone who works on late nineteenth and early twentieth-century imperialism, a global phenomenon dominated and engineered ultimately by the Western Powers.
Satona Suzuki
SOAS University of London
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세진님, 요청하신 권나영의 저서 <친밀한 제국: 한국과 일본의 협력과 식민지 근대성>에 대한 <1,000 단어 요약>과 <평론>을 작성해 드립니다.
📚 <친밀한 제국: 한국과 일본의 협력과 식민지 근대성> <요약>
<친밀한 제국: 한국과 일본의 협력과 식민지 근대성>(2020)은 식민지 조선 말기(1930년대 중반~1945년 해방) 한국인들이 일본 제국주의와 맺었던 복잡하고 모호한 관계를 '친밀성(Intimacy)'이라는 새로운 키워드로 분석한 권나영의 저서이다. 이 책은 기존 식민사관 연구가 주로 폭력과 저항이라는 이분법적 틀에 갇혀 있었음을 지적하며, 식민지 근대성이라는 구조 안에서 피식민지인들이 제국의 주체들과 협력하고 동일시하며, 때로는 제국의 일원이 되려 했던 양가적이고 미묘한 경험의 영역을 깊이 있게 파헤친다.
핵심 주장 및 분석
이 책의 핵심은 식민지 지배가 단지 국가 권력의 폭력적 강제로만 이루어진 것이 아니라, 일상의 친밀한 관계와 근대적 욕망을 통해 작동했다는 점을 밝히는 데 있다. 권나영은 당시 지식인, 문인, 대중문화의 수용자 등 다양한 주체들의 행위를 분석하며 다음과 같은 영역에서 친밀성이 발현되었음을 보여준다.
동일시와 변용: 식민지 조선의 지식인들은 일본의 '문명'과 '근대성'을 학습하고 받아들이면서 스스로를 제국의 일원으로 동일시하려 했다. 이러한 동일시는 단순한 강요를 넘어선, 내면화된 근대적 욕망의 발로였다. 그들은 제국의 근대 문물과 사상을 수용함으로써 제국주의적 위계 속에서 자신의 지위와 정체성을 확보하려 했다.
문화적 매개와 협력: 영화, 라디오, 문학 등 대중문화는 제국의 이데올로기를 전파하는 중요한 도구였지만, 동시에 식민지인들이 근대적 삶과 제국을 간접적으로 체험하고, 자신들의 욕망을 투사하는 공간이기도 했다. 이 과정에서 조선인 문화인들은 제국의 문화 정책에 협력하면서도, 그 안에서 조선적인 요소를 매개하고 변용하려 하는 모호한 줄타기를 감행했다.
일상적 관계의 복잡성: 저자는 식민지인과 일본인이 맺었던 개인적이고 일상적인 관계(예: 직장 상하 관계, 이웃 관계, 심지어 결혼) 속에서도 친밀성이 발생했음을 보여준다. 이러한 관계는 겉으로는 '우호적'이거나 '협력적'으로 보일 수 있으나, 그 이면에는 제국이 강제하는 권력 관계와 위계가 깊숙이 내재되어 있었다. 즉, '친밀성'은 제국의 폭력을 은폐하고 합리화하는 기제로도 작동했다.
연구의 의의
<친밀한 제국>은 식민지 시대를 이해하는 데 있어 '협력'의 문제를 정면으로 다룬다는 점에서 중요한 의의를 갖는다. 저자는 친일파를 단순한 '배신자'로 낙인찍는 기존의 도덕적 판단을 넘어, 식민지 근대성이라는 구조적 딜레마 속에서 조선인 주체들이 경험했던 심리적, 사회적 복잡성을 세밀하게 분석한다. 이는 식민지 근대화가 저항과 폭력 외에도 협력, 욕망, 동일시라는 '친밀한' 방식을 통해 지속되고 재생산되었음을 통찰하게 한다.
🖋️ <친밀한 제국: 한국과 일본의 협력과 식민지 근대성>
<평론>
권나영의 <친밀한 제국>은 식민지 조선 연구의 지평을 넓히는 도발적이고 혁신적인 저서이다. 이 책이 제시하는 **'친밀성'**이라는 개념은 식민지 지배의 본질과 피식민지인의 주체적 경험을 이해하는 데 있어 매우 강력한 분석 도구로 작동한다. 저자는 기존 연구들이 쉽게 간과하거나 도덕적 판단으로 치부했던 '협력'의 영역을 끈질기게 파고들며, 식민지 지배의 복잡성을 탁월하게 해명한다.
<뛰어난 분석과 학문적 기여>
첫째, 이 책은 방법론적 혁신을 보여준다. 식민지 경험을 폭력 vs. 저항의 이분법으로 단순화하는 기존 관점에서 벗어나, 피식민지인의 주체적인 욕망과 심리적 내면에 초점을 맞춘다. 특히 근대적 주체로 인정받고자 했던 식민지 지식인들의 양가적인 행위를 '친밀성'과 '동일시'의 관점에서 읽어내는 방식은 설득력이 높다. 이는 식민지 근대성이 단순히 서구 문물의 이식이나 강제적 동원이 아니라, 피식민지인 스스로가 제국의 논리를 내면화하고 그 안에서 자신의 존재 의미를 찾으려 했던 능동적이고도 비극적인 과정이었음을 통찰하게 <한다>.
둘째, '친밀성'을 제국주의 폭력의 은폐 기제로 해석한 점은 매우 중요하다. 저자는 식민지 사회에서 개인적 차원의 협력이나 호의가 궁극적으로는 제국의 위계와 폭력성을 유지하고 합리화하는 데 기여했음을 날카롭게 지적<한다>. 일상적이고 사적인 관계조차도 공적인 식민지 권력 구조로부터 자유로울 수 없었으며, **'친밀함'**이라는 외피가 제국주의의 구조적 폭력을 가리는 마스크 역할을 했음을 보여준다.
<논쟁적 지점과 한계>
그럼에도 불구하고 이 책의 논의는 몇 가지 논쟁적인 지점을 내포<한다>.
첫째, '친밀성' 개념의 경계가 다소 모호해질 수 있다는 점이다. 저자가 제시하는 친밀성에는 단순한 권력에의 순응부터 자발적인 협력, 문화적 동일시 등 다양한 스펙트럼의 행위가 포함된다. 이처럼 광범위한 현상을 하나의 개념으로 포괄할 때, 각각의 행위가 가진 특수성이 흐려지거나, 제국이 강제한 폭력의 정도가 과소평가될 위험이 없는지에 대한 고민이 필요<하다>.
둘째, 피식민지 주체의 책임 문제에 대한 논의이다. 저자는 도덕적 판단을 유보하고 구조적 복잡성을 분석하는 데 주력하지만, 궁극적으로 '친일' 행위가 낳은 역사적 결과를 어떻게 평가할 것인가 하는 질문에 직면하게 <된다>. '친밀한 제국'이라는 담론이 혹여 협력 행위자들에게 면죄부를 줄 수 있다는 오해를 사지 않도록, 구조적 분석과 함께 개인의 윤리적 책임 문제를 어떻게 조화시킬지에 대한 깊은 성찰이 필요<하다>.
<결론>
<친밀한 제국>은 식민지 시대를 살아낸 조선인들의 복합적인 내면과 제국과의 기묘한 공생 관계를 조명하며 한국 근현대사 연구에 큰 울림을 <준다>. 이 책은 '친일'이라는 금기를 넘어설 수 있는 새로운 분석 틀을 제공하며, 현재 한국 사회가 여전히 안고 있는 탈식민주의적 과제와 역사 인식의 문제에 대해 다시 한번 생각하게 <한다>. 식민지배의 잔재가 단지 '타자'의 폭력만이 아니라, 우리 자신의 내면화된 욕망과 선택 속에도 깊숙이 스며들어 있었음을 깨닫게 해주는 필독서라 <할 것이다>.
이 <요약>과 <평론>이 세진님의 이해를 돕기를 바랍니다.
혹시 이 책의 특정 주제(예: 문화 분야의 협력)에 대해 더 자세한 정보를 원하십니까, 아니면 다른 역사 서적을 추천해 드릴까요?
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이 책에 대한 한국의 주류 근대사 학계의 반응은 어떤 것이었나요?
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세진님, 권나영의 **<친밀한 제국: 한국과 일본의 협력과 식민지 근대성>**에 대한 한국 주류 학계의 반응은 '식민지 근대성'과 '협력' 문제를 심도 있게 재고하도록 촉발한 중요한 저작이라는 점에서 대체로 긍정적이고 주목할 만한 성과로 평가됩니다.
특히 이 책은 기존의 연구 방식을 뛰어넘는 방법론적 참신성을 제시했기 때문에, 학계에 새로운 논의의 장을 열었다는 평가를 받았습니다.
🧐 주류 학계의 주요 반응 및 평가
1. 방법론적 혁신에 대한 주목
'친밀성' 개념 도입: 주류 학계는 이 책이 식민지배의 분석 도구로 **'친밀성(Intimacy)'**이라는 새로운 개념을 전면에 내세운 점을 높이 평가했습니다. 이는 기존의 폭력/저항 또는 친일/반일이라는 이분법적 틀을 넘어, 식민지인들이 제국과 맺었던 관계의 중층성과 양가성을 심층적으로 해명할 수 있는 길을 열었다는 점에서 학술적 기여가 크다고 보았습니다.
정동(Affects) 및 정신분석학적 전제: 저자가 단순히 구조나 이데올로기 분석에 머무르지 않고, 피식민지인의 정동적(Affective) 측면, 즉 욕망, 동일시, 내면화 등 심리적인 영역을 분석 대상으로 삼은 점이 학문적으로 신선하다는 평가를 받았습니다. 이를 통해 식민지 근대성의 복잡한 작동 방식을 더 깊이 이해하게 했다는 것입니다.
2. '협력' 문제에 대한 새로운 접근
도덕적 판단 유보와 구조 분석: 이 책은 '친일' 행위자를 단순한 도덕적 비난의 대상이 아닌, 식민지 근대성이라는 구조적 딜레마 속에서 고뇌하고 행위했던 복잡한 주체로 다룸으로써, 한국 사회가 오랫동안 회피하거나 단순화했던 '협력'의 문제를 정면으로 다루는 용기를 보여주었다는 평가를 받습니다. 이는 식민지 시대를 객관적으로 바라보는 데 필수적인 작업으로 인정되었습니다.
제국주의 폭력의 은폐 기제 해명: '친밀성'이 실은 제국의 위계와 폭력을 은폐하고 합리화하는 권력 관계의 결과물임을 예리하게 논파한 점 역시 학계의 긍정적인 평가를 받았습니다.
⚡️ 논쟁적 지점 및 비판
긍정적인 평가에도 불구하고, 이 책의 논의는 몇 가지 논쟁적인 지점을 낳았습니다.
개념의 모호성과 폭력의 과소평가 우려: 일부 비판론자들은 '친밀성'이라는 개념이 너무 광범위하게 적용되어 식민지배의 구조적 폭력과 강제성을 흐리게 만들거나 과소평가할 위험이 있다는 우려를 제기했습니다. 즉, 구조적 억압 아래에서 발생한 행위를 '친밀성'으로 분석하는 것이 자칫 제국의 폭력성을 희석시킬 수 있다는 것입니다.
윤리적 책임 문제: 도덕적 판단을 유보하려는 저자의 태도가 협력 행위자의 역사적/윤리적 책임을 너무 쉽게 면제해 주는 것처럼 비칠 수 있다는 지적이 있었습니다. 학계에서는 구조 분석과 윤리적 책임 사이의 균형을 어떻게 잡을 것인가에 대한 후속적인 논의가 필요하다는 목소리가 나왔습니다.
<결론>
권나영의 <친밀한 제국>은 한국의 근대사, 특히 식민지 시기 연구에서 '협력'의 영역을 근대적 주체의 욕망과 심리라는 차원에서 심층적으로 탐구하게 함으로써, 기존 연구의 한계를 극복하고 새로운 연구 방법론을 제시했다는 점에서 주류 학계의 깊은 관심과 높은 평가를 받은 수작입니다. 이후 식민지 근대성과 탈식민주의를 다루는 연구자들에게 중요한 이론적 기반을 제공하고 있습니다.
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세진님, Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan(권나영 저)에 대한 한국 근대사·식민지사 연구계의 반응을 정리하면 다음과 같습니다. 이후 영어판 요약도 이어집니다.
한국어 설명
한국 학계에서 이 책이 갖는 의미와 비평적 수용은 다음과 같이 요약될 수 있습니다.
수용 및 긍정적 평가
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이 책은 기존의 식민지사 연구에서 ‘협력(collaboration)’ 또는 ‘저항(resistance)’이라는 이분법 중심의 서술을 넘어, ‘친밀성(intimacy)’이라는 개념을 도입했다는 점에서 학계로부터 주목을 받았습니다. 예컨대, 한국 문학‧식민문학 분야에서 “기존 연구가 제국 권력에 저항하거나 혹은 굴복한 피지배자 중심의 서사에 머물렀다”는 문제의식을 제기하면서, 권나영의 연구가 그 궤도를 확장했다는 평가가 나왔습니다. journal.kci.go.kr+2De Gruyter Brill+2
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문학텍스트, 언어선택, 제도참여 등을 통한 분석도 비교적 정밀하다는 평이 있습니다. 특히 일본어로 창작한 한국인 작가의 경험을 통해 식민지 근대성의 질서를 재고했다는 점이 긍정적으로 인용됩니다. eprints.soas.ac.uk+1
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또한, ‘근대성(modernity)’을 단지 서구 근대 수용이나 민족 내부 변화로만 보지 않고, 제국권력과 피지배자가 언어·문화적 교차 속에서 맺은 관계망으로 본다는 점에서 식민지사 연구의 지평을 넓혔다는 평가가 나옵니다. Pacific Affairs (UBC Journal)+1
비판적/제한적 시각
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다만 한국어권 논문에서는 권나영의 접근이 갖는 한계도 지적됩니다. 예컨대 한 평론에서는 “모든 설명이 식민지 한국-일본 제국 관계의 선형적(rather than 복합적) 흐름으로 환원되는 경향이 있다”고 지적하며, 구조적 권력관계(식민권력의 폭력성 및 피지배자의 저항 가능성)가 충분히 드러나지 않는다는 비판을 합니다. journal.kci.go.kr
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또한, 한국 학계 내부에서 ‘협력’ 또는 ‘일제하 문학’을 다루는 맥락에서, 이 책이 제시한 ‘친밀성’이라는 개념이 너무 광범위하고 유연해서, 어느 지점에서 ‘협력’으로 판정할 것인가 또는 ‘피해’로 봐야 할 것인가의 기준이 흐려진다는 지적도 있습니다.
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더불어, 한국 내 연구자들 혹은 민족주의적 틀을 사용하는 학계에서는 이 책이 “식민피해자의 경험이나 민족저항의 서사를 희석할 우려가 있다”는 우려를 나타내기도 했습니다. 즉 ‘협력’을 중시하는 담론이 민족주의 서사의 맥락에서 비판받을 수 있다는 것입니다.
종합적 평가 및 함의
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요컨대, 한국의 근대사·식민지사 연구계에서는 이 책을 ‘새로운 연구 패러다임의 제안’으로 받아들이는 한편, 동시에 전통적 민족사관/저항사관을 넘어서는 시각이기에 갖는 논란과 경계도 분명 존재합니다.
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세진님께서 관심을 갖고 계신 “식민지 하의 민중의 생활과 감정”이라는 주제와 연결해 보면, 이 책에서 제시하는 언어·제도·교류의 분석틀이 민중사나 감정사(affective history) 측면에서도 유용한 도구가 될 수 있습니다. 다만, 민중(농민, 노동자, 여성 등) 층의 보다 다양한 경험을 이 틀 안에서 어떻게 읽어낼 것인가, 권력과 피권력의 비대칭성이 어떻게 작동했는가를 별도로 보완할 필요가 있다는 점이 한국 학계가 제언한 부분입니다.
English Explanation
In the South Korean historical-academic context, the reception of Intimate Empire by Nayoung Aimee Kwon can be described as follows:
Positive reception
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The book was praised for moving beyond the traditional binary of “collaboration vs. resistance” in colonial studies, by introducing the concept of “intimacy” between coloniser and colonised. It was seen as expanding the scope of Korean colonial literature and cultural history. eprints.soas.ac.uk+1
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Its detailed analysis of Japanese-language Korean writers, institutional participation, and language choice was considered a strong contribution to scholarship on colonial modernity in East Asia. Pacific Affairs (UBC Journal)+1
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It reframed modernity not just as internal Korean transformation or Western importation, but as embedded in imperial linguistic and cultural networks — this finding resonated with scholars seeking to broaden the narrative of Korean modernity. dukeupress.edu
Critical perspectives
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Some Korean scholars noted limitations: the argument sometimes appeared to reduce complexities to a somewhat linear Korea–Japan colonial trajectory, without fully explicating the structural power asymmetries, coercion and violence inherent to colonial rule. journal.kci.go.kr
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The flexibility of the “intimacy” concept raised a concern that it might blur distinctions between coercive collaboration and voluntary cultural exchange, making judgement of “who collaborated” or “who resisted” more ambiguous.
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In more nationalist-oriented circles in Korea, the book’s emphasis on “cooperation” rather than solely “victimhood” or “resistance” generated caution: there were concerns it might undercut nationalist narratives of colonial suffering and anti-Japanese resistance.
Overall assessment and implication
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Overall, Korean mainstream modern/colonial history scholarship receives the book as a valuable and innovative intervention, while also noting that it invites further work — especially to include the perspectives of non-elite actors (peasants, labourers, women) and to deepen analysis of power and inequality within colonial intimacy.
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For your project on “life and affect under colonialism”, Sejin-nim, this book provides a useful framework (language, institution, exchange) but also signals that applying it to the experiences of non-elite people will require adaptation and attention to specific lived-experience data.
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이 책에 대한 한국에서의 반응을 박유하의 책 <제국의 위안부>에 대한 반응과 비교하고 싶습니다. 우선 이 책은 영어로 쓰여지고, 한국어 번역판이 나올 때 까지 시간이 걸리고, 또 상당히 학술적이어서 일반 독자는 잘 읽지 않을 것이라는 점이 있습니만, intimacy 친밀한관계라는 이슈가 정도는 다르지만 공통적으로 있습니다. 박유하의 책 경우에는 일본군과 위안부가 어느 케이스에는 동지감이 있었다는 포인트에 대하여 민족주의적 입장에서 강한 비판이 있었는데, 이 책의 경우에는 어떻게 비슷하고, 어떻게 달랐는가요?
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세진님, 권나영 교수의 **<친밀한 제국>**과 박유하 교수의 **<제국의 위안부>**에 대한 한국 사회와 학계의 반응을 '친밀한 관계'라는 키워드를 중심으로 비교 분석해 드립니다.
두 저작은 식민지 시대의 복잡성을 다루며 기존의 **'민족 대 제국'**이라는 이분법적 구도를 흔든다는 점에서 공통점을 가집니다. 하지만 분석 대상과 논쟁의 성격이 근본적으로 달라 한국 사회의 반응은 극명하게 달랐습니다.
1. 공통점: '친밀한 관계'의 도입과 양가성(Ambiguity) 탐구
두 저서 모두 식민지배를 단순한 폭력과 강제만으로 설명하는 기존의 민족주의적 서사를 거부하고, 그 관계 속에 존재하는 **'친밀성(Intimacy)'이나 '양가성'**을 분석의 핵심으로 끌어들였습니다.
| 특징 | <친밀한 제국> (권나영) | <제국의 위안부> (박유하) |
| 핵심 키워드 | 친밀성(Intimacy), 협력, 동일시 | 동지감, 애정, 관계의 복합성 |
| 도입 의의 | 식민지 근대성을 욕망하고 내면화했던 조선인 지식인들의 모호한 주체성을 해명. | 위안부 피해자가 처했던 상황이 일방적인 성노예를 넘어 인간적인, 혹은 병리적인 관계의 복합성을 내포했을 가능성 제시. |
| 공통 목표 | 식민지 관계를 선/악의 이분법에서 해방시켜, 복잡하고 모순된 인간의 행위를 구조적으로 이해하고자 함. |
2. 차이점: 분석 대상의 차이와 민족주의적 비판의 강도
두 저서에 대한 한국 사회의 반응이 가장 크게 갈린 지점은 바로 분석 대상의 윤리적 민감성과 그에 따른 민족주의적 담론의 충돌 강도였습니다.
2.1. <친밀한 제국>에 대한 반응: 학술적 논쟁과 자기 성찰 (온건한 비판)
권나영의 책은 상대적으로 학계 내의 방법론적 논쟁으로 머물렀으며, 박유하 교수의 책만큼 격렬한 대중적 비판이나 법적 문제로 비화되지는 않았습니다.
분석 대상의 민감도: 권나영 교수는 일제 말기 지식인, 문화인, 대중이 제국과 맺었던 '협력' 관계를 다룹니다. 이들은 '친일파'로 분류될 수 있지만, 이들을 향한 비판은 구조적 모순에 대한 자기 성찰의 성격을 띠기 때문에 상대적으로 학술 담론 내에서 수용될 여지가 컸습니다.
비판의 성격: 비판은 주로 학술적/방법론적이었습니다.
"친밀성 개념이 너무 광범위하여 폭력성을 희석시키는가?"
"협력 주체에 대한 윤리적 책임론을 어떻게 다룰 것인가?"
즉, **'이 분석이 유효한가?'**에 대한 논의였지, **'이 분석 자체가 금기인가?'**에 대한 논의는 아니었습니다.
민족주의적 비판: 이 책은 결국 '친일파'의 심리적 복잡성을 다루는 것이기에 민족주의적 비판에서 완전히 자유로울 수는 없었지만, 궁극적으로 **"우리 안의 식민지 근대성을 비판적으로 해체해야 한다"**는 더 깊은 자기 비판의 틀 안에서 논의가 진행되었습니다.
2.2. <제국의 위안부>에 대한 반응: 윤리적/법적 쟁투 (격렬한 비판)
박유하 교수의 책은 한국 사회의 핵심적인 민족적 상처이자 윤리적 마지노선인 '일본군 위안부' 문제를 건드렸기 때문에 학계와 대중으로부터 전면적인 거부와 단죄에 가까운 비판을 받았습니다.
분석 대상의 민감도: 박유하 교수는 일본의 국가 폭력에 의해 피해를 입은 여성 피해자를 분석의 대상으로 삼았습니다. 피해자와 가해자 간에 '동지감'이나 '애정'이 존재했을 수 있다는 주장은, 위안부 제도를 국가 차원의 성노예 제도로 규정하고 피해자의 순결한 피해자성을 강조하는 주류 민족주의적 서사와 정면으로 충돌했습니다.
비판의 성격: 비판은 윤리적, 도덕적, 법적 차원에서 이루어졌습니다.
"피해자의 명예를 훼손하고, 가해자의 책임을 면피하는 친일적 시각이다."
"역사적 사실을 왜곡하고 피해자 중심주의 원칙을 위반했다."
박유하 교수는 명예훼손 혐의로 기소되었고, 재판 과정은 대중의 뜨거운 관심을 받으며 학문의 자유 대 윤리적 책임이라는 격렬한 논쟁을 낳았습니다. (결국 유죄 판결이 확정되어 한국 내에서 금서에 준하는 조치가 취해졌습니다.)
민족주의적 비판: 박유하의 책에 대한 비판은 역사 인식의 근간을 흔드는 '금기'를 침범했다는 인식에 기반했기 때문에, 이는 학술적 토론을 넘어 민족적 감정과 정의의 문제로 비화하여 강력하게 작동했습니다.
3. 결론
권나영의 **<친밀한 제국>**이 **"식민지 근대성이라는 구조적 폭력 속에서 조선인이 가졌던 복잡한 심리와 협력"**을 다루며 학계 내의 자기 성찰을 이끌어냈다면,
박유하의 **<제국의 위안부>**는 **"국가 폭력의 피해자를 다루는 데 있어 인간적인 친밀성을 언급"**함으로써 민족주의적 정의감과 윤리적 분노를 폭발시키고 대중적, 법적 단죄를 불러왔다는 점에서 그 반응의 성격과 강도가 확연히 달랐습니다.
요약하자면, 두 책 모두 **'친밀성'**을 통해 식민지 관계의 양가성을 분석했지만, 권나영의 책이 '협력 주체'의 복잡성을 다루어 학계의 방법론적 논쟁에 머물렀다면, 박유하의 책은 '피해자'의 서사를 건드려 한국 사회의 가장 민감한 윤리적, 민족적 경계를 넘었기 때문에 전면적인 거부와 법적 논쟁에 직면하게 되었습니다.
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훌륭한 비교 포인트입니다, 세진님.
권나영의 *『친밀한 제국 (Intimate Empire)』*과 박유하의 『제국의 위안부 (Comfort Women of the Empire)』 사이에는 ‘친밀성(intimacy)’이라는 공통 주제가 존재하지만, 두 책의 학문적 지향, 담론의 층위, 사회적 반응의 양상은 매우 다릅니다.
아래는 그 비교를 체계적으로 정리한 것입니다.
Ⅰ. 공통된 문제의식 ― “식민지 지배의 관계를 이분법으로 설명할 수 있는가?”
두 저자는 모두 “가해자/피해자”, “제국/식민지”, “가해/저항”이라는 도덕적·민족주의적 이분법을 넘어서려 했습니다.
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권나영은 한국인과 일본인 사이의 언어·문화·제도적 교류 속에서 생겨난 “친밀성(intimacy)”을 통해 식민지 근대성의 복합성을 조명합니다.
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박유하는 일본군과 위안부 사이에도 일정한 “공동체적, 혹은 의존적 관계”가 존재했음을 언급하며, 단순한 “피해자 vs 가해자” 서사를 넘어 제국이라는 공동 공간에서의 모순된 감정을 드러내려 했습니다.
두 책 모두 이런 시도를 통해 ‘국가 중심’·‘도덕 중심’ 서사로부터 벗어나려 하지만, 대중적·정치적 수용 환경의 차이 때문에 반응은 극명하게 달랐습니다.
Ⅱ. 차이 1 — 언어 · 출간 · 독자층의 차이
| 항목 | 권나영 『친밀한 제국』 | 박유하 『제국의 위안부』 |
|---|---|---|
| 언어 및 출간 경로 | 영어 (Duke University Press, 2015) → 학술 시장 중심 확산 | 한국어 (2013) → 대중 서점 및 언론 집중 논쟁 |
| 독자층 | 해외 학계, 영미권 일본학 · 한국학 전공자 | 일반 독자, 언론, 정치권까지 확산 |
| 수용 공간 | 학문적 토론 중심 (문학·문화연구 저널) | 사회 운동 · 정치 논쟁 중심 (정대협 · 법정 공방 등) |
| 논쟁 강도 | 한정된 학계 비평 수준 | 전면적 사회 논쟁 및 형사 고소 사건 발전 |
즉, 권나영의 책은 한국어 번역판이 늦게 나왔고(2021년 전후 일부 발췌 번역), 영어권 학술장 안에서 논의되었기 때문에 “정치적 스캔들”로 비화되지 않았습니다.
반면, 박유하는 국내어로 직접 출간했고, 위안부 문제라는 상징적·감정적 의제를 건드렸기에 운동 진영·언론·법정까지 확산되었습니다.
Ⅲ. 차이 2 — ‘친밀성’ 개념의 성격과 윤리적 함의
| 구분 | 권나영 ‘친밀한 제국’ | 박유하 ‘제국의 위안부’ |
|---|---|---|
| 핵심 개념 | Cultural Intimacy – 언어·제도·감정 교차가 만드는 제국적 관계 | Affective Camaraderie – 식민지 전쟁 상황 속 감정적 공동체 혹은 의존 |
| 적용 대상 | 작가, 지식인, 문학 제도 참여자 (엘리트 층) | 일본군 과 조선인 위안부 (사회적 하층 여성) |
| 분석 목표 | 식민지 근대성의 복합성 이해 (지배와 동화의 모순 공존) | 도덕적 피해자 서사의 재검토 (복잡한 감정의 공존) |
| 윤리적 프레임 | 학술적 분석 – 도덕적 판단 유보 | 역사·도덕 논쟁 – “피해자 모욕” 비판 초래 |
| 담론 지위 | 문화연구, 탈식민 비평 | 공공 기억 정치, 시민운동 영역 |
즉, 두 책 모두 “친밀성”을 다루지만,
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**권나영의 ‘친밀성’**은 구조적·언어적 교류의 분석 개념이며,
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**박유하의 ‘동지감’**은 도덕적 감정의 재해석 개념으로 작동했습니다.
그 결과, 권나영의 논의는 “제국-식민지 관계의 복합적 구조 해명”으로 받아들여진 반면, 박유하의 주장은 “피해자-가해자 관계의 도덕적 경계 흐림”으로 해석되어 공분을 일으켰습니다.
Ⅳ. 차이 3 — 비판 양상 및 사회적 결과
| 항목 | 권나영 | 박유하 |
|---|---|---|
| 비판 중심 | 학계 내 논의 – “권력 비대칭 성찰 부족”, “엘리트 중심 서술” | 시민사회 · 운동권 비판 – “피해자 폄하”, “일본 책임 희석” |
| 논쟁 형태 | 학술지 서평 · 세미나 중심 | 언론 · 국회 · 법원 까지 확산 |
| 학문적 영향 | 동아시아 식민지 문학연구의 새 패러다임 제시 | 위안부 담론의 ‘피해자 중심주의’ 문제 공론화 |
결국, 권나영의 책은 **“탈민족주의적 식민지 연구의 한 축”**으로 자리 잡았지만, 박유하의 책은 **“기억 정치 갈등의 중심”**이 되었습니다.
Ⅴ. 개념적 위치의 요약
| 범주 | 권나영 『친밀한 제국』 | 박유하 『제국의 위안부』 |
|---|---|---|
| 접근 유형 | 제도 · 언어 · 문화 중심 탈식민 분석 | 감정 · 윤리 · 기억 중심 도덕 비판 |
| 주체 층 | 엘리트 문인, 지식인 | 하층 여성, 피해자 |
| 목표 | 제국 근대성의 복합성 해명 | 피해자 서사의 비판적 재구성 |
| 결과 | 학문적 토론 및 용어 확산 | 사회적 논쟁 · 법적 공방 |
| ‘친밀성’ 의미 | 제도적·언어적 교류 속 상호 형성 | 전시 현장의 감정적 의존 및 공존 |
Ⅵ. 종합 평가
두 책은 **“식민지 관계의 회색지대 (gray zone)”**를 주목했다는 점에서 공통적입니다.
그러나,
-
권나영의 연구는 언어적 매개 · 제도 · 문학 속 ‘친밀성’의 구조적 분석,
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박유하의 연구는 전쟁 · 성 · 감정 속 ‘친밀성’의 도덕적 재해석이라는 차이를 가집니다.
따라서 반응의 강도와 논쟁의 층위도 달랐습니다.
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전자는 학문적 논쟁 수준에서 수용 및 부분 비판,
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후자는 기억 정치의 폭발적 논쟁으로 확산되었습니다.
요컨대, 두 저자는 모두 “민족주의적 기억의 단선적 도덕성”을 넘어서려 했지만,
권나영은 학문적 ‘구조 비판’,
박유하는 **공적 ‘도덕 비판’**의 길을 택했고,
이 차이가 한국사회에서의 수용 가능성과 저항의 강도를 갈랐습니다.
원하신다면, 두 책의 “친밀성 개념의 어휘적·철학적 차이”를 중심으로 한 심층 비교(예: affect, collaboration, intimacy의 영어권 용례 차이)도 1,000단어 분석으로 이어드릴 수 있습니다. 그렇게 해드릴까요?
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