Diaspora Humanities Series, Vol. 7
Asia, the Far East, the Orient, Eurasia, Greater East Asia… This book examines the literary and cultural efforts of Koreans who sought to anchor the various “utopias” surrounding Asia within concrete places on the map. It arises from a desire to recover colonial and postcolonial practices of geographical imagination that had long been constrained by homogenized visions of Asia imposed by imperial and Cold War frameworks, and were thus in danger of disappearing into the interstices of history. At the same time, the book aims to render visible once again the traces of “other” places and temporalities that these practices attempted to construct.
The book is significant in that it reveals how the spatiotemporal configurations of “Asia” in the 1930s and 1940s, which can be understood as having converged entirely toward the totalizing frameworks of empire or the Cold War, were in fact plural and contested and had plural modes of region/identity diversification drawing on the competing other currents and the performativity of individuals.