Japanophone Literature? A Transpacific Query on Absence
Abstract
This essay inquires into the significance of the absent category of Japanophone literature in light of the recent rise of a global discourse on Sinophone literature and other postcolonial critical genealogies. This discussion of broader postcolonial taxonomies sets the stage for an investigation into the position of Japan as a minor empire in relation to its European counterparts. The precarious location among divided literary fields of colonial Korean writers, such as Kim Saryang, provides a segue into linking contested postcolonial and cold war legacies in the Asia-Pacific.
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Nayoung Aimee Kwon
Nayoung Aimee Kwon (권나영 クォン ナヨン エイミー) is an award-winning multilingual author and a professor in Duke University's Asian & Middle Eastern Studies; Art, Art History, & Visual Studies; and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. She is Founding Director of Duke's Asian American & Diaspora Studies Program and Co-Founder of Andrew Mellon Games & Culture Humanities Lab. She was a founding board member of Duke Asian Alumni Alliance in 2019 and helped establish Duke Engage Koreas and co-directs this global service learning program based in Durham and Seoul working with refugee and migrant communities from around the world.
Interdisciplinary research expertise include literary and translation studies; film and media studies; post/colonial history and theory; gender and sexuality studies, with a focus on global Asian, inter-Asian and transpacific encounters. Current research examines contested politics of cultural memories across colonial and cold war violence and their lasting generational reverberations in Asia and across the Pacific.
Select and award-winning publications include Intimate Empire (Duke University Press), Theorizing Colonial Cinema (in collaboration with philosopher Takushi Odagiri and film scholar Moonim Baek, Indiana University Press), Antinomies of the Colonial Archive (in collaboration with historian Takashi Fujitani) and essays in Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of Asian Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Social Text, Sanghŏ Hakpo, Decolonial Manual, Cross-Currents, and various anthologies and collected volumes. With collaborators at the University of Netherlands, the Hague, and elsewhere, she is a developer of hybrid platform infinite strategy games (ISG) about historical conflicts. Her work has been recognized globally by multiple Fulbright grants, National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Korea Foundation, Japan Foundation, Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, Korean Literature Translation Institute, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Asia-Pacific Studies Institute, Duke University Office of the Provost, Arts & Sciences Council, Trinity Office of the Dean, among others. She works in five languages and is a translator of literature and graphic novels from Korean and Japanese into English. In her past life, she was a poetry editor in New York and holds a PhD from UCLA and BA from Duke University.
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