英文摘要 |
This article deals with the literary representations of inter-ethnic marriages between Japanese and Han Chinese in colonial Taiwan by focusing on Taiwanese author Zu Dien-ren’s Chinese short story “Standing Out in a Crowd” (1936), Japanese female writer Masugi Shizue’s “The Southern Tongue” (1941), and Japanese male writers Shoji Soichi’s Madame Chin (1944) and Kawasaki Denji’s “December 9th” (1944). It explores how these works reveal the complex process through which writers of different ethnicities and genders negotiate national and gender borders under the Japanese Empire. The analysis is concerned with how national and gender borders are redrawn, in correspondence with the different imperatives of the Japanese Empire, through various ways of inclusion and exclusion of interior ethnic others as decided by ethnic blood line, language, etc.; as well as how these processes contribute to the Japanese constructions of self, national and imperial identities by negotiating the conflicts between the national discourse of single ethnicity and the polyethnic composition of the empire. Eventually, it is argued that the heterogeneities of women, domestic diversities of the local, and ethnic differences (of the colonized) in Greater East Asia that are represented in the texts unintentionally reveal the constructedness and self-contradictions of the “pure” Japanese imperial subject. |