The session will offer four short papers before opening a lively discussion with the audience. Kun Huang begins with a retranslation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin half a century after its first Chinese performance, staged by Chinese students in Japan. Ouyang Yuqian, playwright and member of the original drama group, substantially revised the abolitionist text to suit “the zeitgeist of Third-World anti-imperialism.” The new translation (published and performed under the title Heinu Hen in 1959-1962) radicalized the figure of Uncle Tom and the fugitive slaves in the image of socialist revolutionaries with acute class consciousness. Polarizing black suffering and white oppression, Heinu Hen erases the black-white interracial sympathy in the original novel and negotiates its own anti-racist and re-racializing processes through the ventriloquization of black experience. It thus reconfigures Sino-black identification informed by a supposedly colorblind Maoist internationalism through two interconnected impulses: one that posits the sympathetic Chinese spectatorship apart from the black-white racial binary in America, another that assumes political alliance of people of color. While such identification reinforces the teleological rhetoric of the global revolution, its anti-colonial racial legibility sabotages the socialist logic of class-based alliance and ultimately leads to a “creolized” rewriting of Cold War politics.
Next, Andrew Dong-Hyun Kim explores Korean director Bong Joon-Ho’s “bad translations” in his two latest films, Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017), speculative narratives where global capital, mobility, and linguistic ability work across given groups to form uncommon communities with significant racial tensions. As examples of Western-centric hallyu cinema, Bong’s two films feature Korean characters who play important translating roles for heterolingual and multiracial ensembles. Kim focuses on how these Korean-speaking characters move in and out of translatability in order to advance interests not necessarily commensurate with the larger group. Following from Naoki Sakai’s conceptualization of translation as a hybridizing and mutually transformative social relation, Kim considers how heterolingual collectives may operate without the assurance that what is being communicated will be understood or enacted upon uniformly. Racial difference in Bong’s white-dominant collectives presents the translating act as an unequal and unreliable form of contact, troubling the notion that inter-lingual communication is transparent and that transnational circulations of commodities (paradigmatic of the Korean hallyu form) involve equal exchanges of value.
Christina Yi will then consider what happens when passing is translated – both literally and figuratively – into the context of zainichi (lit. “residing in Japan”) Korean literary production. Elaine K. Ginsberg identifies racialized specularity as one of the central mechanisms of passing in her introduction to the influential essay collection Passing and the Fictions of Identity. As the largest diasporic community in Japan, zainichi Koreans represent a case where ethnic difference does not necessarily coincide with racialized difference. Although their writings comprise a diverse literary corpus, it can be argued that passing – i.e. the social and legal processes through which ethnic Korean minorities pass for Japanese – constitutes a central problematic in zainichi literature and film, whether it is explicitly articulated as such or not. Because passing is not necessarily a transgression but a default demand imposed upon ethnic minorities by Japanese society, literary and filmic representations of that passing can be both ubiquitous and invisible. Yi rethinks received notions of passing through a close reading of Yi Yang-ji’s “I am a Korean” (Watashi wa Chōsenjin, 1977), considering how its various forms of linguistic passing allow us to theorize the complex relations of race, ethnicity, and gender from a different global perspective.
Finally, Mario De Grandis looks at Hui Fiction in post-1980s China and what he terms “Sino-Arab Literary Bridges.” De Grandis investigates the formation of the Hui literary field in the post-1980s and its synergies with the Arab world. At the textual level, ethno-Islamic references occupy a pivotal position in the many Hui literary works. At the institutional level, Sino-Arab connections are fueled by Arabic translations of Hui fiction, often supported by governmental grants. Taking as case studies the multi-volume book series “Hui Contemporary Literature” (2012–2015) and two short stories anthologized in it—Bai Lian’s “Mountain Pass” and Shi Shuqing’s “The Grey Robe”—De Grandis argues that Hui literature can be located on three distinct yet interwoven levels of identification: local (the rural reality), national (China as a nation-state), and transnational (the Middle East as the Hui’s ancestral place of origin). Together, the stories and their circulation through Arabic translations complicate the understanding of ethnic minority literatures as solely local phenomena.
In these papers, which are all in conversation with recent work in both race and translation theory, race is always a transnational product, but it is not caught solely in a binary reflection between East and West, or black and white. Our goal is thus to better understand the entangled practices and representations of racialized being in the contexts of East Asia.