초록 열기/닫기 버튼
On 14 April 1932, the winners of the first shokumin bungei tanpen shôsetsu (植民文芸短編小説) competition were announced in the pages of the Burajiru jihô (伯剌西爾時報, Noticias do Brasil) newspaper, which was published in São Paulo, Brazil. The notion of shokumin bungei (植民文芸) and the related notion of shokuminchi bungei (植民地文芸), both of which might be rendered as "colonial literature," were in use during the imperial period and are terms that have been productively re-examined in recent years. In those cases, however, the term shokuminchi (植民地) seems limited to places that "had become part of Japan under the rubric of cession, annexation, or mandate." Obviously, Japan's empire never included the sovereign state of Brazil. What makes this Japanese-language literature from Brazil “colonial literature” then? At one level, the confusion stems from a fundamental ambiguity present as far back as the Latin origin of the term shokumin; at another level, however, this usage can perhaps prompt us into an important reconception of the organizing principles of literature and the limitations of the national literature model.
