Session 10: Narratives of Political Violence

Session 10: Narratives of Political Violence
Chair: Eleonore Wildburger

Practice of Violence, Competing Narratives: Choices of Interpretations in the Vigilante Massacre Trial in 1923 Japanese Empire
Jin-hee Lee
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign USA & University of Tokyo, Japan

The experience of violence has powerful consequences in the transformation of culture and history. The Great Kantô earthquake of 1923 brought unprecedented massive material destruction in imperial Japan, and, as the disaster soon became subject to human interpretations and political manipulations, to cultural rupture and social violence as well. The traumatic experiences of the natural and social violence opened up an unusual space for contested debates and discussions over the meaning of “Japanese public” that was to be protected and promoted in the midst of the turmoil. Such cultural contestation within the social manifested itself in the massacre of over six thousand Koreans and the controversial process of the legal prosecution of the vigilantes for the crime in the Japanese empire–a long-neglected historical incident that was triggered by rumours of arson, murder, and rebellious riots by the colonized people in the metropolitan area immediately following the earthquake.
Focusing on the competing narratives on the violent moment in the vigilante trials in the prewar Japanese Empire, this project explores the cultural terrain that the collective violence brought to Japanese society concerning the ways in which the colonized were imagined as the natural disaster brought cultural contestation on the socially transformative category of “Koreanness” and the simultaneous process of imagining the “Japanese public.” The debates and controversies on the interpretations of the massacre were embedded in the process of establishing the in/excusability of the massacre in the post-earthquake metrolitan area. Through the analysis on the webs of relationships among the experience of social violence, interpretations of the violent past and the construction of cultural identity, this project provides an excellent lens through which the issue of historical agency can be explored within the social as it continues to practice the politics of culture and history in the form of competing narratives. Thus, this paper will highlight the power of human imagination not only to practice and represent violence but also the potential to resist and recover from violence, as we make our choices for the ways to unfold human history.

My paper will consider the ways in which territorialism, territoriality and spatial idiomatics have intersected with literary production and critical reception in Sri Lanka since the civil war. This is a war based on competing narratives of home and homeland, with the Sri Lankan government’s bid to preserve the ‘unity and territorial integrity’ of the island being pitted against the Tamil separatist struggle to create an independent ‘Eelam’; a war which has seen mobilisation and migration on an unprecedented scale creating a range of experiences of displacement, from those who have been internally displaced, to political refugees and exiles, as well as those who while physically remaining at home have had their relationship to their environment dramatically altered by the experience of bombs, landmines, and the construction of policed border controls.
Drawing upon Lefebvre’s alignment of the ‘space of representation’ and ‘the representation of space’, I assess the ways in which nationalist imperatives have worked to shape not only spatial configurations in literature, but also influenced critical evaluations of literary texts, bringing to crisis issues such as authenticity, canonicity and the politics and representation of belonging and exclusion. I explore the view that the de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation that have resulted from the war allow for new formulations of belonging to emerge, and investigate the ways in which literary texts – such as Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and Arasanayagam’s poetry – reveal specific contestational sites between competing ethnic nationalisms. Both Selvadurai (the product of an inter-ethnic marriage) and Arasanayagam (a Burgher married to a Tamil) are caught in the interstices of contested ethnic identities and both were displaced by the anti-Tamil violence of ’83, Selvadurai as a political refugee in Canada and Arasanayagam as an internal refugee. Moving between the literary evaluation of spatial idiomatics in their work and the critical reception of their work, I suggest that critical evaluations that situate their work in terms of ‘resident’ and ‘migrant’ writing fail to engage with the complex representation of fractured space found in the writing itself. I argue that Sri Lankan literature not only reflects, but is itself constitutive of, spatial and territorial relations, actively producing discursive cartographies that challenge, subvert or reinforce national and sub-national spatial constructions and that the writers are, in Said’s words, ‘trying to make the territory available for imaginative occupation’, engaging in a literary reclamation and re-configuration of national space that is in active dialogue with the armed conflict.