The colonial frontier: Primitive accumulation, migration, and settler colonialism in kando literature

This chapter discusses literature written in or about the Kando region of Northeast Manchuria during the era of Japan’s colonization of Korea (1910-45). It argues that the focus on Korean migration to the imperial metropole, or from the countryside to the colonial capital, has coded our sense of spatiality and prevented a fuller picture of the cultures of colonial migration, Japanese imperial expansion, Korean settler colonialism, and Korean nationalism. Turning attention to the gendered processes of primitive accumulation and bordering, it reads Kando literature against the grain of long-held assumptions about the relations between Japanese imperialism and Korean nationalism.