Instability of Empire: Earthquake, Rumor, and the Massacre of Koreans in the Japanese Empire

Interestingly, precisely because of this unsettled nature of the violence---which thus defies any singular narrative that satisfactorily explains the incident empirically---the massacre of Koreans sheds light on the development of subjective narratives on collective violence in the culture of empire. In an attempt to explore the relationships that weave together disaster, rumors, massacre, and narrative-making in an empire, this project explores rumors, trial discourses, and commemoration as sites of analysis to create a window on the contested construction of multiethnic modern Japan. By analyzing a wide range of texts such as children's writings, paintings, and testimony, this project demonstrates the centrality of the colonial regime of representations in imagining the colonized others and the Japanese public. This project calls for methodological innovation in colonialism and imperialism studies by taking an archival journey to explore such non-conventional sites of historical analysis as rumors and other spaces of competing narratives through the visual, artistic, and literary manifestation across the metropole and the colony. Thereby, Instability of Empire calls attention not only to the impact of the presence of the colonized in the metropole but also the power of human imagination in practicing and interpreting violence, thus highlighting the incomplete nature of narrative control and the imperative imagining historical agency within the social in and beyond the archives .

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

East Asian Languages and Cultures

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Lee, Jin-Hee

Contributors dc:contributor

• Toby, Ronald P.

• History, Modern

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3160910

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/87206