Moving archives, touch, and world literary melancholy in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through a reading of Han Kang’s 2007 novel The Vegetarian, this article critiques two prevailing approaches to world literature and the politics of memory: a liberal cosmopolitan celebration of cross-cultural legibility and a postcolonial politics of “melancholic” resistance to globalization. It argues that both employ an opposition between legibility and illegibility, either celebrating world literature for its potential to make unfamiliar histories accessible, or for its ability to disrupt a globalized present through illegible fragments of past trauma. Illustrating how this opposition also animates debates around memory politics in postcolonial South Korea, the article suggests this oppositional approach to the past emerges from the histories and ideological logics of colonial modernity and remains normative across varied contexts. In contrast, The Vegetarian evokes new possibilities for world literary “resistance”, reimagining it as a form of material-discursive friction which transforms normative structures through encounters in the present.