Christina S. Yi

Christina Yi is a scholar of modern and contemporary Japanese literature and culture, with a research focus on issues of postcoloniality, genre and narrative theory, language politics, and cultural studies. Her first monograph, Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea (Columbia University Press, 2018), investigated how linguistic nationalism and national identity intersect in the formation of modern literary canons through an examination of Japanese-language cultural production by Korean and Japanese writers from the 1930s through the 1950s. The research and writing of this project was funded through generous grants from the Northeast Asia Council of AAS, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), among others.

Her current research project investigates the discursive formation and theoretical limits of “repatriation literature” (hikiage bungaku) through an examination of fiction, essays, and memoirs on the subject of repatriation to Japan, by both Japanese and non-Japanese writers. This project was funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant and Japan Foundation fellowship. Professor Yi is also an active translator, and was a recipient of the William F. Sibley Memorial Translation Prize for her translation of Kim Saryang’s “Pegasus” (Tenma).

Selected Publications:

Author:
Imperial Testaments: Repatriation Narratives in Modern Japan (advance contract at Columbia University Press)

Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea (Columbia University Press, 2018)

Co-editor:
Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan’s East Asia Empire (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023)

“Zainichi Literature and Film” in Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture 12 (2019)

Translator:
Kim Sŏkpŏm, Death of a Crow (Karasu no shi; Seoul Selection, 2022)