Christina Yi’s Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea is a welcome addition to English scholarship in Korean and Japanese studies that examines language and literary ideologies under Japanese colonialism through a postcolonial, transnational lens. Joining important works such as Nayoung Aimee Kwon’s Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan (2015) and Serk-Bae Suh’s Treacherous Translation: Culture, Nationalism and Colonialism in Korea and Japan from the 1910s to the 1960s (2013), Yi introduces new perspectives on bilingual, diasporic Korean writers who wrote in the Japanese language, a practice that became differently politicized under shifting political, historical, and social environments during and after Japan’s colonization of Korea. Although Yi’s monograph spans writings from the 1930s to the 1950s, Colonizing Language has present significance, uncovering the ideological roots of contemporary Korean and Japanese national literary canons that were formed along ethnolinguistic imperial and then national borders. Yi’s work further complicates the splintering of national canons in the latter half of the twentieth century into categorizations of zainichi (residing in Japan) Korean literature, North Korean literature (Chosǒn munhak), and South Korean literature (Han’guk munhak), unearthing the intricacies of canonization, or what Yi defines as “the process through which ideologies of (national, imperial, linguistic) identity came to signify” (xvii). The six chapters of the book are organized in a roughly chronological manner: the first half focuses on the language ideologies that facilitated the logic of the Japanese empire—Japanese imperial policy around national language (kokugo) during the imperialization period (kominka)—and the latter half focuses on the immediate postwar period in Japan, as the Japanese empire is dismantled and rearticulated as a nation-state.

One of the strengths of Yi’s work is her extensive archival practice that uncovers the material circumstances of the imperial publishing industries, the ideological exigencies of imperialization in the colonies, and a comprehensive range of nonfictional texts and fictional writings in Japanese, Korean, and English. Her methodology mirrors her central theoretical reading of language and literature as intertwined in their social, historical, and material settings, and is further enriched by a postcolonial framework that illuminates the colonial contestations in the politics of writing, the performance of language, and the paratextual. Writing in Japanese for Korean writers during Japan’s imperial period, Yi illustrates, was not simply about having the space and access to a language to speak, but also involved a textual space that “was already structured by the forces of politics and commercialism and shaped by the demands of the readership” (58). This perspective shows the connections among imperial ideology, cultural production, and colonial subjectivity, and allows for a nuanced understanding of writers like Yi Kwangsu and Kim Saryang, whose works have previously been read within national literary history.

Although many studies on colonial culture and language ideology have stopped short at the end of the Japanese empire, Yi’s consideration of the occupation period (1945–1952) adds a new dimension to the consideration of Korean writers, in particular zainichi writers who had been formally educated in Japanese. Although ideologies of the imperialization period touted racial sameness (kominka) at the same time as maintaining ethnic hierarchy, Yi shows that these contradictions did not disappear during the occupation period but persisted under the changing meaning of the national language (kokugo) under the postwar nation-state. Yi’s reading of zainichi writer Chang Hyǒkchu’s “Intimidation” (1953), who was criticized as a collaborator of the Japanese empire in the postwar period, reveals how Korea’s “liberation” was not a promise of liberation for all: “for others it simply recast the same set of chains into other names: returnees, residents or other remainders of empire” (92). Given both Koreas in the postwar period utilized the falsely oppositional representations of the Japanese “collaborationist” and resistor to build their own national histories, Yi shows that the hybrid identity of the Korean writer of Japanese embodies the ambiguities and continuities of the context of empire in the (post)colonial period.

Colonizing Language is an undoubtedly valuable contribution to the fields of Korean and Japanese studies. I believe it is also an essential text for researchers outside of East Asian studies interested in the formation of national literary canons, language, colonial culture, and empire.