Professor Miya Qiong Xie was recently awarded the Modern Language Association of America's First Book Prize for her new book.
The associate professor of Chinese and comparative East Asian literature received the prestigious award for Territorializing Manchuria: The Transnational Frontier and Literatures of East Asia, which was published by the Harvard University Asia Center.
Established in 1993, the MLA's First Book Prize honors a first book-length publication of a member of the association that is a literary or linguistic study, a critical edition of an important work, or a critical biography.
In a Q&A, Xie discusses the impetus for the book and how her research offers an important perspective for reconciliation in a contested region of the world.
What led you to focus on China's Northeast?
I grew up in China. Throughout my education, every textbook of Chinese literature contained one or more pieces written by writers from the Northeast. I loved those pieces. They depicted the vast and fertile northern land in charming language, with a sorrowful mixture of lament for a loss of belonging and desire to belong that touched me deeply. What made these pieces ideal candidates for a textbook was that most of them were written during a period when the land was taken over by the Japanese—from 1931 to 1945—and they firmly reinforced the belief that this was a Chinese land that needed to be recovered. That was all I knew about China's Northeast.
Then I went on to study Korean, Japanese, and comparative literature. It started to puzzle me that many Korean and Japanese writers, and even Taiwanese writers, whom I enjoyed reading also turned out to have something to do with China's Northeast. I use "turned out" because I wasn't aware of their connection to China's Northeast when I read them in courses on Korean or Japanese literature. I only found out when I started to study these writers on my own as research subjects.
For example, Abe Kōbō, the world-famous postwar Japanese writer, lived the first twenty-some years of his life in China's Northeast before he returned to Japan after Japan's defeat in WWII in 1945. The high-profile Korean writer Yŏm Sangsŏp turned out to have lived in China's Northeast for nearly a decade in the 1930s and 40s with a number of other Korean writers, and they wrote in Korean there—which was a big thing because it would have been far more difficult for them to write in Korean in their home country under Japan's linguistic assimilation policies at the time. By the time I found the same connection in the life of the Taiwanese writer Zhong Lihe, I knew it could not be a coincidence. So I decided to give it a serious look.
How has your research transformed your view of the region?
My research unfolded a new literary history: at one time, writers from all over East Asia were going there, or writing about it, or both. This was because the land was once a contested frontier where Chinese—of different ethnicities including the Han, the Manchu, the Mongols, and so on—Japanese, Korean, and Russian peoples all wanted to carve out a space of belonging, as their states were competing for sovereignty in that territory. It was a time when the entire region was transforming from the old system of empires and kingdoms into modern nation-states, which involved an intense bordering process that decisively influenced the way those peoples viewed themselves vis-à-vis their nations and states as they struggled to transform themselves into modern subjects.
That is why I saw in all their work a mixture of lament, nostalgia, and aspiration with regard to a sense of spatial belonging, even as many of them fiercely condemned their cultural neighbors. This process of co-formation at the very site of contestation and exclusion propelled me to embark on the topic as a book project.
In the book, you describe a new theory of "literary territorialization" to reconsider East Asia's modern literary tradition. How do you explain this?
As a first-time book author, I initially wanted to find some theoretical resources that were already there to make sense of the mess I had in hand: a number of writers from different national and ethnic backgrounds, writing in different languages, trying to come to terms with an intense bordering process that involved all of them. That search brought me to literary and cultural studies of the US-Mexico borderland. I remember reading Gloria Anzaldúa's iconic work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and feeling inspired, because the mezcla, or hybridity of different and divided spaces, languages, and literary and cultural traditions that she described in her book was also common in the works I study.
But whereas Anzaldúa embraces and celebrates this hybridity as resistance to the oppressive order reified in the border of the imperialist state, what I found in my texts was that writers enlisted these devices not as a criticism of but as an instrument of territorial expansion. In response to the heated contestation of geographical borders, they used strategies of hybridity to claim territory in the linguistic or cultural realm on behalf of their nation or empire.
In East Asia when countries were transforming from old empires and kingdoms to modern nation-states, territory making almost always entailed a desire for territorial expansion—an attempt to claim as much territory as possible so as to gain the upper hand in the global system of nation-states. But if you want to expand your territory, you have to start by crossing the existing border and dealing with what lies beyond it, and so it is sometimes to the advantage of the expansionists to claim that "borders and identities are always shifting."
I was gradually able to see that for most of the writers I was reading, writing about the frontier was a way to counter their cultural neighbors' territorial claims with claims of their own—and in some exceptional cases, with a critical reflection on their own claims. Accordingly, although many writers from the region wrote only in their own language for their own national group, their works, when read together, constitute a contested dialogue with a shared territorial desire. This is what I call "literary territorialization," but it's only the first part.
The second part is that, when some of these frontier writings were then circulated back to the national or imperial centers, they were elevated as quintessential works of nationalist literatures. This was because in trying to fulfill the frontier task of claiming territory in close proximity to others who were trying to claim the same territory for their own nations or empires, these writers had to come up with novel literary techniques for imagining nation and empire. Not all their inventions were favored by the cultural authorities in the national or imperial centers, but some were. When they were subsequently canonized in the heartlands and in national literary histories, those "border-crossing" moments, which were precisely where new literary techniques for imagining nation and empire took form, were rendered mostly invisible to non-frontier readers. This process in which frontier work is "territorialized" by the institution of national literature is the second part of "literary territorialization."
What were some of the challenges you encountered in pursuing this research?
It wasn't easy to find many of the works I studied, because they were associated with a history that all East Asian countries wanted to half forget and half control.
Many scholars based in East Asia as well as North America opened their home studies, basements, offices, and computers for me to search for the materials I needed, and I'll forever be grateful to them. Among them, Ōmura Masuo and Okata Hideki have passed away, and I regret that I could not publish my book soon enough for them to see it. I put up my interviews with them, conducted when I was still a graduate student, on a website called History of Northeast China, that Norman Smith, professor of history at the University of Guelph, Canada and I curated. This website also contains a good collection of multilingual and multimedia materials from the period, as Norman and I hope to continue to pass these precious materials to other scholars.
What do you hope readers take away from the book?
For readers of East Asian studies, my theory of literary territorialization helps uncover a transnational origin of national narratives that reveals a process of co-formation in contestation. This is an important perspective for regional reconciliation, because the transnational past of China's Northeast is still a contested topic that divides East Asian countries today.
For readers outside the regional field, I hope this theory may offer a nuanced approach to borderland literature and culture that does not oppose division to connection but instead identifies connections that are enabled by division. Or, to quote Thomas Nail, another scholar of the US-Mexico borderland that I frequently quote, the dividing process is itself "a process of circulation" that generates social formations.
