Transpacific Palimpsests: Early Twentieth-Century Korean Migrant Literature between Two Empires

FAIN: FT-286047-22

Yoon Sun Yang
Boston University (Boston, MA 02215-1390)

Research and writing leading to a book on literature by Koreans who migrated from Japan to the U.S. in the early twentieth century, and their blending of literary and cultural traditions from both sides of the Pacific. 

This book project analyzes the Korean-language literary archives formed in the space between the Japanese and the US empires by Koreans who migrated from the former to the latter for work. I contend that Korean migrant writers’ allegedly limiting condition of not being able to write in English not only put them in a precarious position but also empowered them. Disfranchised in their home country as well as in the place where they settled, they tried to make sense of their perpetual nonbelonging by blending literary and cultural traditions from both sides of the Pacific in an eclectic fashion. In so doing, they came up with innovative political and aesthetic imaginations not readily available either to those whose creativity was circumscribed by colonial censorship laws in Korea or to other ethnic minority writers in the United States who could publish their works in English only after framing their voices for mainstream audiences.