Entangled Ecologies of the Everyday: Gender, Labor, and Nature in Rural Proletarian Literature of Korea and Japan

My dissertation, “Entangled Ecologies of the Everyday: Gender, Labor, and Nature in Rural Proletarian Literature of Korea and Japan,” traces the co-evolution of laboring bodies, both human and more-than-human, with the land in mining-themed proletarian literature from the early twentieth century. The texts I analyze map the corporeal and ecological effects of mineral extraction on rural regions of the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago to produce what I call “rural proletarian literature.” I argue that these works engage in ecological storytelling because they situate the interrelations among laboring bodies, gender, and the material environment of mining zones at the heart of the story. These interrelations, which I refer to as “ecological entanglements,” generate a kinetic energy that propels the narrative forward; they reveal sites rife with both peril and promise for the sustainability of local ecosystems. Rural proletarian literature critiques colonial-capitalism as a system that extracts minerals at a rate that violently disrupts the rhythms of nutrient cycles. In order to highlight the lived effects of extractive labor, these texts immerse themselves in the sonic territory of the everyday and engage in storytelling as care work; these narratives delineate creative collaborations that emerge in interstitial spaces, resisting the (re)production of destructive cycles of accumulation. This project consists of four chapters, each examining stories about a mineral utilized in the material axis of empire: (NPK): Soil and Sericulture, (Cu): Copper Soundscapes, (Au): Speculative Rumors of Gold, and (N): Atmospheric Mining and the Soil Crisis. Each chapter takes a trans-local perspective, placing stories about particular geographical sites in conversation with one another. Rural proletarian stories capture how laboring bodies co-produce the environment around rich ore veins and, consequently, are productive for reconsidering our contemporaneous understanding of primitive accumulation in an age of perpetual ecological crises