Essay About National Identity

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The population of Koreans in China today includes millions descendants of Korean immigrants with citizenship of the People’s Republic of China. This Korean community makes it the largest ethnic Korean population living outside Korean Peninsula already. They are mainly descended from migrants who came between 1860 and 1945. During the constant displacement process, Koreans ever took on role from refugee, paddy land cultivator, Japanese collaborator, to tax collector. Among all the roles, the ever existed puppet nation-Manchukuo which has collapsed accompanied with the surrender of Japan in 1945 tried to identify its people with a legalize role before. To give the region Manchuria its own identity, for many Chinese, might perilously close to…show more content…
The answer is definite. And how can we approach this notion in a comprehensive way? By reifying the connotations of national identities, it invents us to specify the agents that do the identifying. If the powerful agent is a modern state, then the study on literature would make more sense in understanding how a state mobilizes its people by utilizing literature. To investigate national identity through analyzing literature inside and outside grant us a comprehensive way to explore it in historical, political, and cultural and author’s perspectives. National identity is similar to narratives that both pedagogical and performative: it is overtly inculcated into the nation’s citizens; literary canon itself becomes one of the institutions that teach and reinforce national identity through the emotional mobilization during the aesthetic experience. In the cultivation of national identity, on one hand, the role of artists and writers in the national myth-building is vital. It was literary figures who originally coined the term reproduction. Literature held a privileged role as indivisible mirror of social reality. Literary figures present the national identity by creating national and historical myths to unify a disparate population. On the other hand, literature colored with aesthetic purpose under colonial gaze held the privilege role as mirror of given social

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