Destabilizing Racial Harmony: Hybridity, Nationality, and Spatiality in the Law and Cultural Production of Manchukuo

DESTABILIZING RACIAL HARMONY: HYBRIDITY, NATIONALITY, AND SPATIALITY IN THE LAW AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF MANCHUKUO by InYoung Bong This thesis/dissertation document has been electronically approved by the following individuals: Gunn,Edward Mansfield (Chairperson) Pan,An-Yi (Minor Member) Cochran,Sherman Gilbert (Minor Member) DESTABILIZING “RACIAL HARMONY”: HYBRIDITY, NATIONALITY, AND SPATIALITY IN THE LAW AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF MANCHUKUO A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by InYoung Bong August 2010 © 2010 InYoung Bong DESTABILIZING “RACIAL HARMONY”: HYBRIDITY, NATIONALITY, AND SPATIALITY IN THE LAW AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF MANCHUKUO InYoung Bong, Ph.D. Cornell University 2010 Based on archival research of law, history, literature, and film, my dissertation adopts an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to examine the representations and positioning of “foreigners” in both literary and visual texts, including films, produced in the 1930s and 1940s in Japanese-occupied Manchuria by writers from Mainland China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. My central concern in this study is to show how non-colonizers such as Russians, who were perceived as racially white but were not colonizers, and the offspring of interracial marriages between Chinese and Russians, (Taiwanese) Chinese, and Koreans in Manchukuo simultaneously mapped out and destabilized the boundaries of race and nationality within the processes of nation-building and (de)colonization. This study draws upon historiography, narratology, reader-response criticisms, and various literary and cultural theories to examine one of the central concerns: the use of language in narrative and (oral) history; the systems of signs are not only a primary and powerful means to forge racial, hybrid, and national identities; they are also the very location where boundary making and crossing are simultaneously constituted and deconstructed. The flux of asymmetrical but interrelated racial relations reifies to some degree cultural agents’ changing ideas of race and racial thinking. Yet the employment of their diverse modes of rhetoric and trope to describe changing ideas of race and racial thinking simultaneously yields unexpected disruptive effects on the essentialization and centralization of nationality, so that the construction and accumulation of national capital are hampered by the same processes of articulation in writing, however inconsiderable and limited the articulations are. Cultural agents’ social imagination and creative modes of representing and thinking about boundaries of race and ideas of the social are not strictly confined to building nationality and homogenization and stabilization of space, but rather, they inscribe the possibility of deterritorialization, as well as diverse and discursive historical contingencies that deconstruct race and nationality. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH InYoung Bong studied Chinese language and literature and received a B.A. from Chungbuk National University in South Korea in 1994. She went to China for her graduate study and earned her M.A. in Modern Chinese Literature at Beijing Normal University in 1999. She came to Cornell University to pursuit graduate studies in the fall of 2002. She earned her M.A. in East Asian Literature in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell in 2004 and completed her Ph.D. dissertation in 2010. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My dissertation on Manchukuo has directly drawn from Professor Edward M. Gunn’s suggestion about conducting research on the proximate nexus in possible cultural exchanges and interactions between China and Korea. His timely and apposite guidance in each stage of dissertation writing, from collecting source materials and conceptually structuring them to writing, has greatly enabled me to facilitate the interdisciplinary research. At every step I have been inspired by his own scholarly interests in Chinese literature and film and course work on them; his gamut of study topics and approaches is comprehensive, extensive, and thematically well focused. I deeply thank him for allowing great intellectual leeway and guiding me to pursue interdisciplinary approaches in subject matter and methodology. And above all things, his questions and discussions, careful and meticulous reading of the dissertation, his insightful comments and constructive feedback, and his encouragement and constant support were most valuable for fleshing out my arguments and ideas more thoroughly and precisely. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to Professors Sherman Cochran and An-yi Pan, whose course work, careful reading and constructive comments, encouragement and warm support were also of paramount importance to completing my dissertation as well as to enhancing my understanding of the subject of China and learning research methodologies in their areas of specialization of the fields of Chinese history and art history. My special thanks also go to Professors Katsuya Hirano, Victor Koschmann, and Naoki Sakai in Japanese studies; I really appreciate their careful reading of parts of the dissertation chapters, insightful discussions and comments, and encouragement. I have been particularly grateful to Professors Dennis Washburn and Christopher P. Hanscom at Dartmouth College, who gave me the opportunities to present parts of my dissertation at the 2007 MLA Convention in Chicago and the workshop, iv “Itineration of Difference in Colonial Discourse,” held in May of 2010 at Dartmouth College, where they showed me warm hospitality. The workshop was an intellectually inspiring experience for me, and I thank Professors Kim Brandt, Alan Tansman, and Louise Young, together with the organizers, for their constructive feedback on my work and their guidance to me to look into my research from their project agenda of race and empire in East Asia, as well as for their encouragement. Professor Jeon Hyung-Jun, my undergraduate advisor at Chungbuk National University in South Korea (now at Seoul National University), and Professor Wang Furen, my M.A. advisor at Beijing Normal University in China (now at Shantou University), not only opened the doors to modern Chinese literature but also widened them by honing my knowledge, research, critical thinking, and writing skills. Their intellectual acuity and their common interest in the roles of intellectuals have been integral to boosting my intellectual growth. In addition to various forms of support from my advisors and other professors, my dissertation research benefited from the help of other people within and outside academia, including kind assistance from those numerous, anonymous librarians of the research facilities in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan where I conducted my field research and collected source materials. This field research was in part funded by the East Asia Program at Cornell University, and I thank the Program for its financial support. Research Fellow Zhang Quan at the Beijing [Municipal] Academy of Social Sciences introduced me to Mei Niang, an eminent writer from the Manchukuo era, and accompanied me when I interviewed her in the fall of 2006 and summer of 2007. Interviewing her offered precious opportunities to learn more about the colonial past, and I am indebted to them for their generosity and warm hospitality. Librarian Guan Xuelan at the Municipal Library of Harbin City offered me access to the library’s own catalogue to unearth more source materials, v and I particularly appreciate her kind assistance. I would like to thank Professor Misawa Mamie at Nihon University, Deokhyo Choi, Hideyuki Sadakane, and Masamitsu Harasawa for their assistance and amiable hospitality during my stay in Japan. I am grateful to friends and colleagues, particularly those who came to my presentation of the paper on “Russians in Manchukuo” at the Cornell East Asia Colloquium in the spring of 2007 and shared their perspectives and critical insights with me: Christopher Ahn, Jeffrey DuBois, Christopher H. Jones, Takeshi Kimoto, Peter Lavelle, and Kun Qian. I also thank Seok-Won Lee for reading parts of dissertation chapters and for having thought-provoking discussions on them and sharing his research interest in the Japanese Empire and colonialism in general, together with Takeshi. Noriaki Hoshino kindly went over my Japanese romanization, and I thank him for his assistance. I thank Paola Iovene and Jin Liu for reading parts of the dissertation chapters and sharing references and their critical comments with me, and for their warm support. My special gratitude also goes to the editors Ingrid Arnesen, Monica Cohn, and Amy Reading, who carefully proofread my writing and patiently answered any questions arising from matters of English composition and style. Without their invaluable help and kind support, I could never have completed my dissertation writing. Finally, I would like to express particular thanks to my professors, teachers, and friends who have been sharing their passions for the arts and artistic sensibility, as well as gastronomic fun and pleasures with me, all of which have been conducive to nurturing and enhancing my personal well-being and provided me with warm and positive sources of creative energy. Hopefully, our feeble but constant activities of daily living add a little bit of beauty and peace to things, to nature, the world, and the universe, however little these activities may be visible and sensible. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

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