The Current State of Modern Korean-Japanese Studies: A Panel Discussion

Nikki Floyd is a postdoctoral fellow at Williams College in the Department of Asian Studies. She has long been interested in Japan-Korea relations, particularly during the colonial period. She has taught courses that examine modern Japanese and Korean literature in comparative perspective, and her dissertation, entitled “Bridging the Colonial Divide: Japanese-Korean Solidarity in the International Proletarian Literature Movement,” explores the solidarity relationship between left-wing writer-activists in the 1920s and 1930s. Floyd’s remarks will focus on the costs and benefits of researching and teaching Japan and Korea comparatively. Todd A. Henry is Assistant Professor of Modern Korean/East Asian History and faculty affiliate of the Program in Critical Gender Studies at the University of California-San Diego. He is the author of “Assimilation’s Racializing Sensibilities: Koreans as ‘Yobos’ and the ‘Yobo-ization’ of Japanese Settlers ” (forthcoming in Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique) and is currently completing a book manuscript on the intersections of power and space in colonial Seoul, 1910-45 (forthcoming from The University of California Press, Asia-Pacific Modern Series). Henry’s comments will focus on comparative and transnational approaches to recent history writing on topics such as Japanese assimilation, imperial governmentality, and settler colonialism in Korea. John Treat is Professor of Japanese in Yale’s East Asian Languages and Literatures and chair of LGBT Studies. He is the author of “Choosing to Collaborate: Yi Kwang-su and the Moral Subject in Colonial Korea” (forthcoming, Journal of Asian Studies) and is finishing a study of pro-Japanese Korean intellectuals during the Second World War. Treat’s remarks will center on work that is currently underway in the U.S, Japan and Korea on cultural flows between the peninsula and Japan in the colonial period (1910-1945). Naoki Watanabe is Professor of Korean Language and Culture, Musashi University. He is the author of “Manchuria and Proletarian Agrarian Litature in Colonial Korea”(Jeonjaeng hanun Shinmin, Shikminji e Kukmin Munhwa, Somyeong Chulpan, 2010, in Korean), “On Chang Hyeokju’s Fiction Reclamation(1943)”(Idong hanun Text, Hwengdan hanun Jeguk, Dongguk UP, 2011, in Korean), and “Manchurian Discourse in Colonial Korea and the Political Unconscious: Especially on Literary Critic Lim Hwa’s Case in Early 1940s”(Kundae Hanguk, Jeguk kwa Minjok e Kyocharo, Chekkwa Hamkke, 2011, in Korean). Watanabe’s remarks will center on a survey of Korean Studies in Japan (2005-2010), and Korean Writer’s Japanophone Literature in Colonial Korea: especially by Kim Sa-Ryang and Yi Kwang-su.