Intersectional Incoherence : Zainichi Literature and the Ethics of Illegibility

Abstract

Intersectional Incoherence stages an encounter between the critical discourse on intersectionality and texts produced by Korean subjects of the Japanese empire and their postwar descendants in Japan, known as Zainichi Koreans. Arguing for intersectionality as a reading method rather than strictly a tool of social analysis, Cindi Textor reads moments of illegibility and incoherent language in these texts as a product of the pressures on Zainichi Koreans and their literature to represent both Korean difference from and affinity with Japan. Rejecting linguistic norms and representational imperatives of identity categories, Textor instead demands that the reader grapple with the silent, absent, illegible, or unintelligible. Engaging with the incoherent, she argues, allows for a more ethical approach to texts, subjects, and communities that resist representation within existing paradigms. “Intersectional Incoherence offers an expansive critical curation of a significant but silenced Korean minority literature in Japan. By globalizing intersectional critique on race, gender, and disability, this book is a welcome development beyond Euro‑American postcolonial and critical race studies.” — Nayoung Aimee Kwon, author of Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan “This rich and self‑reflective study aims to tell an anti‑essentialist literary history of the Zainichi community. The fruits of Cindi Textor’s close readings will be relevant to many other literary histories of communities around the world.” — Janet Poole, author of When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea “A powerful intervention that forces us to rethink what literature is, what history is, and what identity is.” — Sonia Ryang, author of Language and Truth in North Korea