The ethical representation of Kando and the making of a new subjectivity in Kang Kyong’ae’s Manchurian writings

Abstract

Kang Kyong-ae has been recognized as one of the most prominent writers in the history of modern Korean literature for her works presenting the class struggle and gender issues in Korean society in the Japanese colonial period. Certainly, many studies have addressed her literary activities in Kando, an area which was also ambivalently referred to the South Manchuria in the Japanese colonial discourse. At the intersection of China, Russia, Japan, and the Korean Peninsula, Kando witnessed the process in which Japanese colonialism expanded its power over East Asia, and the communications, confrontations, and contradictions of diverse cultural, economic, and political systems. By incorporating Mikhail Bakhtin’s ethical thinking of chronotope, it investigates the relationship between Kando and Kang’s writings, sheds light on what immediate reality made Kang’s representation of Kando possible, and how a new subjectivity that negotiated the cultural nationalists and the peasants was made in such a representation of chronotope.