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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Han Kang
• South Korea
• trauma
• memory
• world literature
• resistance

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. See Ranjana Khanna (2003) and Eng, Butler, and Kazanjian (2002).

2. See for instance: Emily Apter (2012), Sam Durrant (2013) and Dan Hartley (2020) on melancholia and world literature. See also: Robert J. Young (2011) on the debate between world literature and postcolonial literature. The term ‘moving archive’ builds on and adapts from the work of Sara Ahmed. See for instance, (Antwi et al. 2013).

3. The Vegetarian was first published in Korean as three separate texts and combined into a novel in 2007. It first appeared in English translation in 2015. References here is to the 2018 edition.

4. Following Japan’s Second World War surrender, the US army occupied southern Korea until 1948, while Soviet forces took control of the North. Following a violent civil war, a Communist government was established in North Korea, while South Korea was ruled until 1987 by a series of US-backed autocratic governments until. See, e.g. Bruce Cumings (2010), Grace Cho (2010).

5. Though often defined in opposition to liberal cosmopolitan “world literature”, such approaches nonetheless frequently retain the transnational scope of its geographical and political ambitions, while also advocating more self-reflexive political form. This anti-global worldliness, or as Hartley terms it, “anti-world literature” (2020, 197; original italics), has ironically been absorbed into what is understood as “world literature” today. See the Warwick Research Collective (2015) on the merging of previously distinct nodes of: “world literature” (emerging from comparative literature) and “global literature” (emerging from postcolonial studies). See also Rebecca Walkowitz (2006) on “critical cosmopolitan” writing.

6. The term “comfort women” refers to Korean women sexually enslaved during Japanese colonization (Soh 2008).

7. Ahmed (2006) reworks phenomenology to imagine the “normative” as “sedimented”.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities DTP funded by the AHRC (2016-19) [AH/L503848/1].

Notes on contributors

Maya Caspari

Maya Caspari is a Lecturer in Literature and the Creative Industries at the University of York, UK. She is currently completing her first monograph Reading Frictions: The Politics of Touch in Contemporary World Literature and co-editing a special issue of the journal parallax on decolonial feminisms. A curator and writer; she is developing her creative practice as a poet. She wrote this article in 2019, while completing her PhD at the University of Leeds. It was joint winner of the 2020 Journal of Postcolonial Writing/Postcolonial Studies Association Postgraduate Essay Prize.