Linguistic (Im)mobility and the Transformation of Korean Language in Ch’ae Mansik’s Late Colonial Literature

Abstract

Abstract This article examines translingual literary circulations through close readings of Ch’ae Mansik’s Korean-language writings from the early 1940s. While a growing number of recent publications have approached late colonial literature through the lens of transnational movement, the primary focus of this emerging body of scholarship has been the Japanese-language writings of Korean writers. Instead of relegating the Korean language of this time to a position of self-evident immobility, this article shows how colonial writings that were never translated into, nor written in, the imperial language reveal indelible marks of border crossings across distances and languages. Ch’ae’s Korean-language texts resist the linguistic hegemony of the Japanese empire not by refusing change or insisting on linguistic purity but by providing testimony of the various ways the Korean language itself was transformed under the demands of the wartime Japanese empire. Countering the idea that automatically equates translation and other forms of transcultural travel to increased heterogeneity, Ch’ae’s writings also show how the wartime instrumentalization of literature as carriers of meaning across greater geographical and cultural distances led to a stripping down of the existing plurality and materiality of sound within the Korean language.