1960년대 초반 동북 조선족의 혁명서사와 국민적 정체성의 재정립―리근전의 『범바위』 초판본을 중심으로―

Abstract

Lee Geunjeon’s Tiger Cliff, a revolutionary narrative that deals with Korean Chinese’ contributions towards the Liberation War, is the literary correspondence of necessity of overcoming the national identity crisis in Korean Chinese society during 1958 and the early 1960s due to their massive reverse migration to North Korea and repairing the relation between Han Chinese and Korean Chinese, and also the way Lee Geunjeon tried to rebuild Korean Chinese’ national identity. This kind of literary correspondence can be observed from the following three aspects. The first one is the establishment of the boundary through erasure of the Korean peninsula and redefinition of hometown. In his novel, Lee Geunjeon used a narrative strategy that erased the Korean peninsula to erase the character of the Korean Chinese as migrants and redefine his hometown as immigrant areas in China to define Korean Chinese as a minority group in China so as to strengthen the border with the establishment of the boundary between Korean Chinese society in Northeast China and Korean peninsula related with it by blood. The second one is to consider Korean Chinese to be national citizens through the process of their ideological choice. In the novel, Korean Chinese’ ideological choice is depicted as an inevitable result of finding the way for their nation by comparing the policies of National Party and the Communist Party towards Korean Chinese and also an inevitable thing related with Korean Chinese’ class basis and the common history of the Anti Japanese struggle of Han Chinese and Korean Chinese. The third one is to get national qualification by joining the army and carrying out land reform. The reason why this literary correspondence can be endowed with important significance in literary history is that it is a ‘national speech’ under the harsh political situation that rectification movement and the anti-local nationalist movement of 1959 swept Yanbian area right after the anti-rightist campaign. This may have been at the request of the Communist Party of China, rather than the individual courage of Lee Geunjeon, or it could have been a kind of sympathy between the Communist Party of China and the Korean-Chinese cadres to which Lee Geunjeon belonged.