Miya Qiong Xie, an Associate Professor at Dartmouth College, delves into the literary landscapes of Manchuria, an integral yet contested frontier in East Asian literature. She discusses how iconic writers like Xiao Hong and Abe Kobo navigate identity and nationalism through their works, revealing the transnational influences in these narratives. Xie emphasizes the importance of literary territorialization in understanding the complexities of national borders, as authors from China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan intertwine their stories, challenging traditional notions of nationhood.
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insights INSIGHT
Literature's Role in Territorial Claims
Literature territorializes when writers from different nations claim Manchuria as their own cultural space.
This creates a dynamic dialogue shaping national identity through literary claims in a contested frontier.
insights INSIGHT
Marginalization in National Literatures
National literary histories marginalize Manchurian literature by compartmentalizing it by nation.
Literature being territorialized shows how literature is shaped and constrained by national narratives.
insights INSIGHT
Frontier Literature as National Reformation
Frontier literature challenges fixed boundaries of national literature through co-formation and contestation.
It depicts nation and ethnicity as fluid, relational, and shaped through transnational negotiation.
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Miya Qiong Xie's "Territorializing Manchuria" delves into the complex literary landscape of Manchuria during the first half of the 20th century. The book examines how writers from China, Korea, and Japan used literature to claim Manchuria as their own, challenging traditional notions of national literature. Xie analyzes the interplay between literature and territorialization, revealing how writers negotiated national identities within a contested frontier. The study highlights the transnational nature of literary production and its impact on shaping national identities. Ultimately, the book offers a nuanced understanding of how literature can both construct and deconstruct national narratives.
Xiao Hong, Yom Sang-sop, Abe Kobo, and Zhong Lihe—these iconic literary figures from China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all described Manchuria extensively in their literary works. Now China’s Northeast—but a contested frontier in the first half of the twentieth century—Manchuria has inspired writers from all over East Asia to claim it as their own, employing novel themes and forms for engaging nation and empire in modern literature. Many of these works have been canonized as quintessential examples of national or nationalist literature—even though they also problematize the imagined boundedness and homogeneity of nation and national literature at its core.
Through the theoretical lens of literary territorialization, Miya Xie's Territorializing Manchuria: The Transnational Frontier and Literatures of East Asia (Harvard UP, 2023) reconceptualizes modern Manchuria as a critical site for making and unmaking national literatures in East Asia. Xie ventures into hitherto uncharted territory by comparing East Asian literatures in three different languages and analyzing their close connections in the transnational frontier. By revealing how writers of different nationalities constantly enlisted transnational elements within a nation-centered body of literature, Territorializing Manchuria uncovers a history of literary co-formation at the very site of division and may offer insights for future reconciliation in the region.
Miya Qiong Xie is Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative East Asian Literature at Dartmouth College. Her research involves modern Chinese, Korean and Japanese literatures. Broadly, she is interested in how people from the margins – geographical or metaphorical – gain power, find identity, and establish connections through transcultural negotiation and co-formation.
Linshan Jiang is Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. Her research interests are modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies.
New Books in East Asian Studies