Serk bae SuhAssistant Professor, East Asian Languages & Literature |
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Research Interests |
Modern Korean and Japanese literature; modern Korean and Japanese intellectual history; colonial and postcolonial studies | |
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Research Abstract |
My current research examines the role of translation in shaping attitudes toward nationalism and colonialism in Korean and Japanese intellectual discourse from the 1910s through the 1960s. Japan’s colonial rule over Korea from 1910 to 1945 stimulated a significant literary output that examined the relationship between colonizers and colonized. Drawing on texts ranging from critical essays to short stories in both the colonial and postcolonial periods, I demonstrate how both Japanese colonial and Korean nationalist discourse pivoted on such concepts as national language, literature, and culture. Critiquing the conventional view of translation as a representation of the original text, a view that was prevalent among both Korean and Japanese intellectuals, I argue that when theorized as an ethical and political practice, translation challenges the ethnocentric view of culture and language embedded in both colonialism and cultural nationalism. The ethicized and politicized theory of translation not only helps the former colonized to envision a community more open to outsiders, but also reminds the former colonizers of their ethical responsibility to build more just international relationships in the postcolonial world. As in the case of translations by writers from Western colonial nations, Japanese translations of Korean history and literature represented the colonized and their culture, and shaped Japanese colonial discourse on Korea. Korean cultural nationalism arose primarily in response to such colonial representation of culture and nation. I argue, however, that because of its ethnocentric view of culture and language, Korean cultural nationalism failed to effectively challenge colonialist claims to colonial rule’s legitimacy. Based on the work of such thinkers as Karl Marx and Emmanuel Levinas, I conceptualize translation as an ethical and political practice, which interrupts the tyrannical dictation of the self over the other and thus enables the former to encounter the latter in language. Translation thus theorized highlights language’s ethical function as a venue where self and other engage in dialogue without silencing unbridgeable differences. It also emphasizes translation’s potential to create an anti-colonial politics by exposing heterogeneity within the languages and cultures of both colonizers and colonized, thereby disrupting the homogeneous linguistic and cultural community promulgated by the colonial hierarchy. As a future research project, I would like to examine the transnational rise of interest in the “Third World” among dissident intellectuals in South Korea during the 1970s and 1980s. Although any challenge to the established system was strictly suppressed by military governments during this period, intellectuals discussed third world anti-colonial and anti-neocolonial struggles and translated such writers as Franz Fanon and Ghassan Kanafani, as well as works on liberation theology and dependency theory. The dominant historiographical view on South Korean dissident movements of the time has emphasized their insular nationalist tendency without recognizing their internationalist aspects. By examining the involvement of Korean intellectuals in the transnational dissemination of an anti-colonial and anti-neocolonial discourse encompassing Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, I would like to re-illumine the third-world solidarity that South Korean dissident movements envisioned. |
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| Publications | “Treacherous Translation: the 1938 Japanese-Language Theatrical Version of the Korean Tale Ch’unhyangj?n,” positions: east asia cultures critique, scheduled to be printed in 18.1 (spring 2010) | |
| Link to this profile | http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5338 | |
| Last updated | 08/13/2009 | |