Titolo della tesi: On the Edge of the Empire: Identity, Language and Negotiation in Okinawan Literature (1910s–1930s)
This dissertation examines how Okinawan literature from the Taishō through early Shōwa periods (circa 1910s–1930s) engages with the structural realities and psychological consequences of colonial subordination within the Japanese Empire. Rather than assuming the presence of themes such as identity crisis, cultural dissonance, or metropolitan marginalization, the study interrogates how these conditions manifest formally and affectively in selected texts. It focuses on narrative techniques including fragmentation, emotional ambiguity, and stylistic disruption, arguing that these features index unresolved tensions of political and cultural displacement.
The analysis, combining postcolonial theory, modernist literary criticism, and close textual analysis, centers on the work of Ikemiyagi Sekihō, Mabuni Chōshin, Yamanokuchi Baku, and Kushi Fusako, authors who articulate the effects of surveillance, linguistic assimilation, spatial instability, and the contested imagination of furusato (homeland). These texts often resist overt political commentary; instead, they stage more ambivalent negotiations of empire through unstable narration, fractured temporality, and moments of affective hesitation.
The central argument is that Okinawan literature of this period constitutes a liminal and hybrid space, one in which identity is neither asserted nor denied, but continually negotiated through minor refusals, unresolved tensions, and aesthetic experimentation. By emphasizing the interplay between form, history, and distress, this study offers a revised understanding of Okinawan literature from the 1910s to the 1930s, foregrounding how it engages empire not only through resistance, but through more elusive, ambivalent, and formally innovative modes of cultural negotiation.