From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men — Yoon Sun Yang | Harvard University Press

From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men — Yoon Sun Yang | Harvard University Press

From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men
Translating the Individual in Early Colonial Korea
Yoon Sun Yang

ISBN 9780674976979

Publication Date: 07/31/2017
Harvard University Asia Center > Harvard East Asian Monographs

About This BookAbout the Author(s)ReviewsSee all: Harvard East Asian Monographs
The notion of the individual was initially translated into Korean near the end of the nineteenth century and took root during the early years of Japanese colonial influence. Yoon Sun Yang argues that the first literary iterations of the Korean individual were prototypically female figures appearing in the early colonial domestic novel—a genre developed by reform-minded male writers—as schoolgirls, housewives, female ghosts, femmes fatales, and female same-sex partners. Such female figures have long been viewed as lacking in modernity because, unlike numerous male characters in Korean literature after the late 1910s, they did not assert their own modernity, or that of the nation, by exploring their interiority. Yang, however, shows that no reading of Korean modernity can ignore these figures, because the early colonial domestic novel cast them as individuals in terms of their usefulness or relevance to the nation, whether model citizens or iconoclasts.

By including these earlier narratives within modern Korean literary history and positing that they too were engaged in the translation of individuality into Korean, Yang’s study not only disrupts the canonical account of a non-gendered, linear progress toward modern Korean selfhood but also expands our understanding of the role played by translation in Korea’s construction of modern gender roles.

The Digital Dictionary of American Regional English [website screenshot]
RECENT NEWS
In a feature profile, The Chronicle of Higher Education declared Theory of the Gimmick author Sianne Ngai to be the “most influential literary theorist of her generation.”
William Sturkey, author of Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White, discussed with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer what to do about Confederate (and non-Confederate) statues and monuments as their, in many cases, outright racist histories are finally acknowledged.
On Bloomberg Businessweek, Tacky’s Revolt author Vincent Brown traced active resistance to enslavement across the British Empire—and how a history of enslavement still marks Black people for victimization today.
BLACK LIVES MATTER. BLACK VOICES MATTER. A STATEMENT FROM HUP »
FROM OUR BLOG
Jacket: The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, by Khalil Gibran Muhammad, from Harvard University Press
“Predictive Policing” and Racial Profiling

While technology used in policing has improved, it hasn’t progressed, says Khalil Gibran Muhammad, if racial biases are built into those new technologies. This excerpt from his book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, shows that for the reform called for by the current protests against systemic racism and racially-biased policing to be fulfilled, the police—especially those at the top—will need to change their pre-programmed views on race and the way they see the Black citizens they are supposed to “serve and protect.” …