Editor’s Introduction

David J. Kim’s “Critical Mediations: Haewŏn Chinhon Kut, a Shamanic Ritual for Korean ‘Comfort Women’ ” describes an elaborate performance cycle in which shamans seek spiritual union with military sexual slaves to relieve their agony, starvation, and suffering. Kim notes that shamans serve as “amplifiers for [living comfort] women who continue to struggle for their record in history,” and this insight leads him to consider how extant analytic possibilities—Gayatri Spivak’s subalternity and Jacques Derrida’s blankness, Jacques Lacan’s preoriginary space, Walter Benjamin’s call to enter the material substance of the event, and Bertolt Brecht’s politicized hinge between memesis and nonmimetic political engagement—might help to reconsider what is at stake politically in the shamanic performance. And he launches his own systematic line of criticism. A permeable membrane exists, he declares, linking the troubled dead, the living comfort woman, shamanic practitioners, and witnesses. Healing emerges when the gaps that comfort women characteristically leave between words and signifieds are recognized to be political. The shamanic performance, Kim determines, compensates for justice denied; the performance is “a mouthpiece for the articulation of politics and the everyday,” yet at the same time it allows “spectral matters from the crevices of history” to collapse and reemerge as “now—a field of poiesis and mimetic encounter.”

In Ben Tran’s “I Speak in the Third Person: Women and Language in Colonial Vietnam,” a less traumatic yet, analytically speaking, equally familiar problem with the subject arises. Working with Khái Hưng’s 1934 novel Nửa chừng xuân (In the Midst of Spring), Tran focuses on Dương Thị Mai, the novel’s protagonist. Tran explains that modernist Vietnamese poetic language had invented a new pronoun, tôi, meaning “the articulation of an individual’s autonomy, interior depth, psyche, and self-consciousness.” Tôi played a central role in the struggle over social subjectivity and, as in other language communities at this time, in the struggle of female individuals to lay claim to tôi and the individualized experiences alleged to be attendant on it. Tran ends asserting that the significant linguistic innovation was in fact language speakers’ creation of nine new personal-references and “seven kinship terms—cụ, ông, con, bà, cô, em, cháu—and two nonkinship common nouns—mình, tôi.” Tran notes as well the existence of the “social footing” where a modernist language crisis had unfolded.

Shifting to consider the city map, Philippe Peycam’s essay “From the Social to the Political: 1920s Colonial Saigon as a ‘Space of Possibilities’ in Vietnamese Consciousness” also targets language and politics in urban internal colonization. In Peycam’s view, internal colonization is the product of a “simultaneous dialogue between the city and the people.” The useful notion Peycam develops, of “waves” of colonization and governmentality, focuses our attention on the city of Saigon, center of Vietnam’s colonial government and on its denizens. Interestingly, the analogy is to concurrent movements in Indonesian, in which new types of social stratification and language use also emerged; in both communities, modernist bourgeois novels are “situated at the crossroads of all the transformations,” which for Peycam start with the fact that Saigon was a colonial city, forcing its inhabitants to create new subject forms as they sought community, in a situation that Peycam names “‘existential’ malaise.”

Christopher Hanscom’s essay, “Modernism, Hysteria, and the Colonial Double Bind: Pak T’aewŏn’s One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo,” tarries with colonial discourse longer. It focuses on a key modernist novel because, Hanscom argues, “the colonial context and the enigma of Pak T’aewŏn’s fictional work” make it necessary to recalibrate our understanding of Korean colonization and its colonial modern fiction. Noting the historical parallel of modernism and the concept of hysteria, Hanscom’s initial objective is to “[draw] the reader … into a hysterical relation” with the novel and Mr. Kubo’s search for satisfaction. But hysteria in its singular form arises because of Japanese imperialism’s well-known “assimilatory colonial discourse,” which insists that subjects be simultaneously the same and different from...