Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance: Japanese and Taiwanese Fiction, 1960–1990 (review)

In Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance, Margaret Hillenbrand undertakes a comparative study of Japanese and Taiwanese fiction in the second half of the twentieth century, and her focus lies in East Asia’s pursuit of modernity and its discontents. For Hillenbrand, East Asian modernity is not merely a given based on Western models; rather, it has to be understood as a historical phenomenon subject to the continued negotiation between the local and the global, the particular and the universal. She contends that modernity cannot express its creative power as well as critical thrust without first demonstrating its specificities of time and space.

In her review of the extant paradigms of East Asian comparative literary and cultural studies, Hillenbrand notes at least two shortcomings. First, for all their critical reflections on regional particularities, East Asianists, particularly those who work in Western academia, have yet to dispel the specter of a binary opposition between the West and the East. That is, even if they set out to subvert the hegemony of Occidentalism, they seem unable to avert their eyes from the West, and they throw themselves into the cycle of anti-Orientalization and self-Orientalization. Second, although interdisciplinary studies have become the currency of our time, East Asianists, particularly those who work in literary studies, have extended their research only to other disciplines that bear immediate relevance to topical realities. They adopt interdisciplinary methods in theory while in practice they never give up traditional social-scientific approaches that treat literature as an index to history.

Hillenbrand argues forcefully that, if an East Asianist truly believes in comparative and interdisciplinary methodologies, it is time to look beyond the East-West model, by looking into the dynamics among the communities within East Asia. She thus proposes an interregional model of scholarship, and her case in point is literature produced in Japan and Taiwan from the 1960s to the 1990s. Hillenbrand’s choice may raise critical eyebrows, because Japan and Taiwan do not appear to be on equal footing by the conventional definition of “national” literatures. But this is where she strikes her point; she intends to call attention to the disparities inherent in the notions of the regional and the national. Her choice, of course, is not accidental either. For 50 years (1895–1945), Taiwan was Japan’s colony, and the political, ethnic, and economic interactions between the two cultures exerted profound impacts on East Asia throughout the modern century.

By concentrating her study on the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, Hillenbrand highlights the fact that the two literatures underwent drastic transformations, in parallel with the political and economic mutations at the time, from “the Rest and Recreation Association, Ampo and the San Francisco system, Minamata, or the Incoming-doubling policy, to war booms, Neo-Confucian familialism, madcap urban planning, ‘black gold,’ ” among others (p. 300). While they wrote so as to inscribe their lived experience, Hillenbrand argues, writers in Taiwan and Japan showed no less effort to write so as to “defamiliarize” themselves with the status quo. The critical notion Hillenbrand draws from Russian formalism, Verfremdungseffekt or defamiliarization, serves as a crucial theme of her book. For her, defamiliarization is both a political stance and an aesthetic device; it is a formal configuration of writers’ idiosyncratic engagement with realities as well as their desire, however implicit, to “do away with” realities. Accordingly, literature is not merely a reflection of history, as the old-fashioned, mimetic approach would have it, but rather a refraction, or even an obscuration, of history. This poetics and politics of defamiliarization leads Hillenbrand to some of the most illuminating moments of her book.

The three core chapters of Hillenbrand’s study deal with three issues that she believes most concern the writers in Japan and Taiwan during the decades she studies: the U.S. geographical and cultural hegemony (chapter 2); the breakdown of traditional kinship systems (chapter 3...