Undoing the Nation-State-Capital Trinity: Turning Inagaki's Petition into a Korean Playwright's Taiwan

Abstract

Abstract This article is the first study that excavates a Korean writer's Chinese-language play based on Taiwanese farmers’ real-life events and that identifies its author as playwright, filmmaker, and novelist Li Kyŏngson. During his Shanghai years (1929–32), Li encountered Japanese journalist Izumi Fūrō’s book, which includes the 1925 petition that Japanese philanthropist Inagaki Tōbei wrote on Taiwanese bamboo farmers’ behalf to support their cause. Li's stage play Taiwan (1930) was born of a densely transnational nexus: a petition by a Japanese philanthropist, a Japanese journalist's monograph, Korean authorship, a Korean-Chinese actor's translation, and the Chinese-language socialist magazine Pioneer. This study analyzes how Li's Taiwan reconfigures the 1925 petition and transcends the seemingly invincible nation-state-capital trinity. Although the petition pleads with the state to condemn Mitsubishi, Taiwan invokes neither the state nor the nation to combat colonial capitalism, drawing instead on anachronism and the leitmotif of kin killing. While tracking the play's counter-nationalist turn, this article's analysis shows that Li revitalizes past events grounded in world religions that bear radical anti-statism at their cores. Briefly yet lucidly, Taiwan also pinpoints the potent moment of anti-capitalism, forcibly buried and hardly resuscitated by Li's contemporaries.