On Decolonizing the Mind: Colonial History and Postcolonial Representation in India, Korea, and Ireland

Abstract

<p>"On Decolonizing the Mind" is generated at the juncture ofpostcolonial studies, Asian/ American studies, and globalization and transnational studies. Exploring literary imagination as an essential part of the social imaginary—one that not only reflects social realities but also fosters decolonizing imagination—I examine literary texts dealing with postcolonial issues in India, Ireland, and Korea in order to demonstrate how literary texts that revisit and rewrite colonial histories contribute to the on-going project of decolonizing the mind: representing and imagining otherwise. I argue that literary representations of colonial histories serve as an alternative historiography against the established discourses of colonial histories.</p> <p>I offer critical readings ofliterary texts such as Imaginary Maps, Comfort Woman, A Gesture Life, Translations, and Dictee. Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps represents the postcolonial condition of indigenous peoples (particularly women) in India. Devi's text highlights her activism on behalf of indigenous peoples in India and leads us to think about the possibilities and limits of literary representation and imagination in engaging with oppressive social realities and creating viable solutions. The ordeals of "comfort women" during the Pacific War, which have begun to receive global recognition since the early 1990s, is an unresolved postcolonial issue in Korea and in many parts of East and South East Asian regions. Among the growing literature on this controversy, the literary representation of comfort women by North American writers demonstrates that the legacy of comfort women is a transnational issue that demands global justice. Focusing on Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman and Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, I analyze how literary representations of comfort women can be an effective medium through which to witness their cultural trauma. My study of Brian Friel's Translations and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee tackles the colonial encounter in Irish and Korean histories, focusing on the colonial policies ofimposing colonizers' languages on the colonized. Friel and Cha show different ways in which to find voices of difference, resistance, and subversion in a language not their own.</p> <p>My comparative study aims to make sense of the complicated ways in which national issues (indigenous peoples in India, the comfort women issue in Korea (and East and South East Asia), the postcolonial turmoil in Northern Ireland, and the postcolonial context of the United States) are closely related to global issues (colonialism, imperialism, global capitalism, and globalization). I claim that postcolonialism in the Western academy has focused too much on European colonization, especially British colonialism; we need to take into account the fact that Japan was a powerful colonial power and then to compare the effects of that colonization—and postcolonization—on places like Korea with British colonialism in India, as well as closer to home in Ireland. I hope that my study contributes to the elaboration of a transnational literacy that can offer a responsible form of cultural explanation through which to explore the interrelations between the national and the postcolonial (or the global).</p>