ABOUT
The Cultures of Crossing symposium represents the fourth meeting of the “Zainichi” Research Consortium, a loosely affiliated international groups of scholars working at the interstices of Japanese and Korean studies, primarily through engagement with the literary and cultural production of ethnic Koreans in Japan. Our previous work has intervened in discourses on empire, race, and diaspora by developing theoretical insights from a context that decenters the West. Now, we seek to broaden our horizons beyond the Japan-Korea binary to explore similar themes across Asia and the transpacific. Presentations explore questions of the local and the global, feminism and intersectionality, representation and power, and transnational pathways of solidarity. Participants attempt to forge new analytical frameworks through which to study the complexity of culture within overlapping imperial spheres in the Asia-Pacific region and across the globe. In the process, we engage self-reflexively with the challenges of scholarship that crosses national, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries.
Publications:
The Politics of Passing in Zainichi Cultural Production
(Special Issue in Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture)
Previous Symposia:
Cultural Production and Coloniality in Modern Japan
(University of British Columbia, 2019)
Interrogating Self-Fashioning as the Other in Zainichi Cultural Production
(Michigan State University, 2018)
(Lehigh University, 2017)