Indigeneity Across East Asian Literatures: Territorializing Manchuria: Land and Literature in the Transnational Frontier

This talk is based on Miya Qiong Xie's first monograph, Territorializing Manchuria: The Transnational Frontier and Literatures of East Asia, published in 2023 by Harvard Asia Center.

Xie will discuss how literature written in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese in and about Manchuria exhibits the authors’ shared desire for claiming the once-contested frontier as a national space of the people they identify with. This process of literary territory-making involves nuanced and sophisticated discourses about land-people-literature relations that go beyond the simplistic binary of the indigenous versus the colonizer. It propelled writers of diverse national and linguistic backgrounds to explore unconventional ways of imagining nation and empire through literature, and consequently to enter a covert but intense dialogical relationship among each other.

Their writing made the Manchurian frontier a crucial site for rethinking the transnational origin of national literatures across East Asia.

Authors to be discussed in the talk include Xiao Hong, Kim Tong-in, Abe Kōbō, and Zhong Lihe, among others.

Part of the Indigeneity Across East Asian Literatures Speaker Series. Curated by Assistant Professor Nathan Vedal, Department of East Asian Studies