Thursday 8 August
Professor John Treat

Seminar co-sponsored with Faculty of Arts Research Concentration in Asian Identities

2.00-3.30 pm
SS&H Library Conference Room

The Sex Life of Collaboration: Wartime France, Korea and Japan

Abstract
Jean-Paul Sartre's 1946 essay "What is a Collaborator?" is most famous, even notorious, for its association of collaboration with both homosexuality and masochism. The collaborator, always gendered male in Sartre's scenario, effeminately seeks to seduce a masculinized invader; and he not only seeks out but revels in the hatred shown him by his more patriotic countrymen. This psychosexual pathologization of collaboration is the lasting legacy of Sartre's essay and its arguments, rightly or wrongly, remain in circulation to the present day. Without it, the conflation of the "underground spy" and the "underground homosexual" during the United States' McCarthyite panic in the 1950s would have made less sense to many people; and later, the scandal of Paul de Man's anti-semitic, pro-German wartime writings would surely have been muted: if collaboration is, par Sartre, the result of a flawed psychology, then presumably de Man's later deconstructionist criticism would logically have had to be tainted by the same innate deviancy.

That collaboration is not an intellectual conviction, but rather the expression of a psychological propensity, effectively removes the event of modern collaboration from history and leaves it a clinical curiosity. One goal of this presentation will be to argue that collaboration, at least in the Korean peninsula during its modern occupation by Japan, needs to be reinserted into a history less idiosyncratic and more structural.

The "passivity" (sexual, intellectual) that Sartre made the hallmark of his diagnosis of the collaborator is also one part of the story told of Korean collaboration with the Japanese from the peninsula's formal annexation in 1910 to the liberation in 1945 that came with the American defeat of Japan in the Pacific. But it is a small part. While echoes of the Sartrean pathologization of the collaborator can be heard in Korea (Yi Kwangsu's pro-Japanese activities, for example, have been blamed on sheer insanity), far more common is the charge that Korean writers, of those who collaborated, did so not out of self-interest or ambition -never the case, says Sartre, of collaborators in general-but out of a conviction (sometimes eagerly arrived at, sometimes reluctantly) that absorption into the Japanese empire was both historically necessary and beneficial for the Korean people. That position seems absurd to us now, but it was not necessarily so at the time. Collaboration itself was not quite the shibboleth it has since become, and our first task to try and recreate not just the political stakes but also the cultural and intellectual milieu of that era which licensed treason against the nation-state: the wholesale assimilation of the Korean population into the imperial ethnos of the Japanese people from 1939 to 1945.

About the Presenter
John Whittier Treat is currently Yale's Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. He has previously taught at the University of Washington, University of California, Berkeley, University of Texas at Austin, and has been a visiting scholar at Aoyama Gakuin University. His publications include, Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture. (Editor) (1996) Curzon Press/University of Hawaii Press, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. University of Chicago Press, 1995, Ibuse Masuji ron. (Japanese translation of Pools of Water, Pillars of Fire: The Literature of Ibuse Masuji) Translated by Yoshino Osamu. Tokyo: Daisan Shokan, and 1988 Pools of Water, Pillars of Fire: The Literature of Ibuse Masuji. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988. He was educated at Yale University, Keiô University, Amherst College and Dôshisha University.