Faculty of Art
My current research project investigates the discursive formation and theoretical limits of “repatriation literature” (hikiage bungaku) through an examination of fiction, essays, and memoirs on the subject of repatriation to Japan. I bring together the writings of various individuals who were rendered invisible by Japan’s reconstitution from multiethnic empire to defeated nation-state – Japanese colonial repatriates, resident Koreans, “returned” Nikkei – in order to show how the visibility/invisibility of difference was neither natural nor inevitable but instead willed into being through specific discursive practices, in Japan as well as in North America.
