Acquired Alterity: Migration, Identity, and Literary Nationalism by Edward Mack (review)
- Acquired Alterity: Migration, Identity, and Literary Nationalism by Edward Mack
Acquired Alterity is a highly insightful and very valuable book, examining the complex phenomenon of literary production and consumption among the Japanese-speaking community in Brazil in the first half of the twentieth century. In the past few years, there has been a surge of scholarly interest in the Japanese Brazilian experience in the anglophone world, both in collective volumes such as Axel Gasquet and Gorica Majstorovic's Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America (Springer, 2021) and through English-language translations of Japanese and Portuguese works, such as Seth Jacobowitz's critical edition of Fernando Morais's Dirty Hearts: The History of Shindō Renmei (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Mack's work, the first book-length study in English of the Japanese-language literary environment in Brazil, is a brilliant addition to this growing body of scholarship, as well as an important contribution to the heated academic debate on the notions of national literature and world literature.
The book is divided roughly in three parts: an introductory section on the formation of a Japanese-language readership in Brazil; a central section comprising English-language translations, done by the author, of select short stories by Japanese Brazilian authors; and a final section providing a close reading of the same stories with particular attention to their representation of national, ethnic, and linguistic identity. Mack's approach is multilingual and interdisciplinary, combining a very detailed picture of the historical, social, economic, and political context of the consumption of Japanese-language literature in Brazil in the early 1900s, a reflection on translation methodologies, explaining his own stylistic and vocabulary choices; and a shrewd textual analysis, including a discussion of the different Japanese-language editions of the stories highlighting a number of significant changes made by the editors.
One of the most original and interesting aspects of the book is that, unlike other academic works on Japanese Brazilian literature which focused exclusively on stories set in Brazil, it takes a broader look at the Japaneselanguage texts that were distributed in the country by local booksellers, particularly but not limited to the renowned Endō Shoten and Livraria Yendo, painting a more nuanced picture of the Japanese-language literary environment of the migrant community. Through meticulous archival and ethnographic research, including an intriguing discussion of copyright disputes [End Page 260] between Brazil-based publishers and Japan-based authors, Mack shows us with a high degree of accuracy what Japanese residents of Brazil were actually reading (in Japanese). This was a combination of imported periodicals, particularly Kingu (King) and Shufu no tomo (The housewife's companion), and locally produced daily newspapers. The latter regularly featured literary works, which were primarily reprints of works originally published in Japan for a domestic audience, first serialized samurai sagas, then texts such as Nakarai Tōsui's Oishi Kuranosuke, narrating the adventures of the celebrated leader of the 47 rōnin, and then short stories based on rakugo storytelling.
Mack demonstrates how reading these works helped strengthen identification with the Japanese "motherland" in the readers, who believed they were reading the same fiction as their fellow citizens at home, but it also created a significant imbalance between the production and consumption side of literature in the migrant community. Considering how comprehensive and perceptive this section is, it is a little disappointing that it seems somewhat disjointed from the rest of the book. Some of the more intriguing elements discussed in the introductory chapters—such as the aforementioned detailed account of the popular fiction from Japan that was most widely read by Japanese residents of Brazil, and was therefore a crucial element in setting the horizon of expectation of the readers of the translated stories—are not mentioned specifically in the discussion of the translated short stories and their analysis, whereas it could have been interesting to draw closer connections between them.
The stories translated in the central section of the book, originally published in magazine and/or book form from the 1920s and...
