71 - From empire to nation: the spatial imaginary of the 1920s to early 1950s

Summary

This chapter focuses on a particular trajectory within the historical process, namely the line extending from modernism's engagement with the topography of empire in the 1920s and early 1930s to the wrenching dislocations that accompanied the implosion of empire and the deferred "return" to the nation in the immediate postwar period. Both modernist and proletarian literary practice can be seen as responding, in different ways, to the accelerated process of urbanization, consumer capitalism and mass culture, and the increasing politicization of cultural production, recording the dispersal and transformation of subjectivities within this fluid environment while tracking the multiple sensations and affects produced by the commodification of the human body and its dislocation from familiar sites of social and cultural meaning. The emergence of the conception of a national language, which gathered steam in the period following the Sino-Japanese War, was connected to the perceived need to spread the Japanese language across the actual and projected space of the Japanese empire.