.png)
Earlier this year, I graduated from Western Washington University with a B.A. in cultural anthropology and minors in East Asian studies and political science. As I am currently in the process of finding my first job out of college in this grueling job market, I am often reflecting on my university experience and the things I learned.
One of the courses I took near the end of my studies was a course on modern Japanese literature, which I would've never taken for a variety of reasons. The course ended up being a lot better than I originally thought, luckily, but only because the professor was new and brought in new material to the department and was a very engaging teacher. If it wasn't for him, this course probably would've been akin to some new-age torture device because of my classmates' obsession and borderline fetishization of Japanese culture and the fact that 90 percent of the course materials' authors were men. The professor added diversity where he could, but he also used the lack of diversity to teach about misogyny in the 20th century Japanese literature and film societies. But this course got me to thinking about the lack of diversity in the course materials in most of my courses throughout university, which were (not) surprisingly mostly written by white men from the USA or a western European country. Even in a literature course about the Asian-American experience, only about 25 percent of the course materials were written by women. There is a lot of discrimination and exclusionary practices in academia and the ways in which we teach students, and I am not the first nor will I be the last to talk about it. Even in a field with a heavy global focus such as the one I was in, we read very little to no works not written from an author from a western country and often from authors who weren't from the cultures my professors were teaching about. This is something that one of my political science professors talked about in my course about decolonizing political science. The political science department was in the process of hiring a new professor to teach courses on African politics and most of the candidates were white men, and our class had a discussion about this and whether or not the ones teaching about other cultures should be from that culture or not. Although western academia can produce quality, thoughtful, and diverse works, not including works from diverse sources only brings detriments to the education provided to students and continues to perpetuate colonial frameworks that idealizes and upholds western ideas of knowledge. The only time I got a chance to get more diversity in my course materials for the most part were in courses from younger professors at my university who actively provided materials on decolonizing academia and provided materials from BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and disabled authors, and also from the courses I took while studying abroad in South Korea at Yonsei University where I got to read a lot more academic articles published by South Korean researchers from South Korean publishers who published or translated their works into English. I don't want to become a professor as teaching is not my cup of tea, but I do hope that younger professors can bring more diversity to courses across universities in the US.
You might've wondered why I went on such a tangent about the lack of diversity in the course materials in my university courses when the title of this article is about discrimination against Asian-language literature. My experiences in university provided a major framework for a small project I am undertaking to create a database of novels written in an Asian language and translated into English from AFAB and Trans-Feminine authors (Note: I will often use the term 'women' or 'woman' interchangeably with AFAB and Trans-Fem/Trans-Feminine since all of the authors I currently have in the database are to the best of my knowledge cisgender women, but as I build this project I hope to bring in more diverse authors as I find them). The goal of this project is to provide a resource for anyone to use to be able to access more of the vast amount of literature that is out there from Asian women who write in an Asian language and move away from prioritizing male perspectives and experiences in literature as well as moving away from prioritizing works originally written in English. I originally was going to include Asian AFAB and Trans-Feminine individuals who write in English as well, but I made the decision to only showcase translated literature because I feel like there is such a heavy preference towards works written in English, and works in European languages, and languages such as those from Asia, but also other underrepresented regions and languages, are deemed as too "exotic" to take seriously in the literature field. And especially in the publishing field, I feel like to be taken more seriously as a international writer, writing in English makes it easier for you to get published. We can see this even in film where movies in non-English languages and only have subtitles don't get as much hype as English language films. I do want to note that I am showing a little preference towards the English language in only including novels translated into English, but I am doing this because I am only a little fluent in one Asian language (Korean) and my abilities are limited to this restraint, and I want this resource to be accessible to people in the US and other majority English speaking countries so they can expand their reading habits outside of the sphere of western literature just a little bit. I also do want to note that majority of the novels and authors I have are from South Korea and Japan at the moment as I am more familiar with these countries and their authors, but as I continue with this project I will be expanding to other Asian countries as I want this to truly be a diverse database that doesn't only focus on East Asia. That would completely negate the purpose of my project to only include such a limited focus. Currently my project is only on a Google spreadsheet, but I hope in the future it will grow into something more visually appealing. And another goal I have for this project (although a very lofty goal) is to contribute to improving diversity in the western publishing sphere to publish more translated works from Asia and non-European countries, even if it's just a miniscule affect. One of my dream jobs is to become a Korean-English translator of books, movies, and other media, but for now as I build my fluency I will just focus on this project.
Click here to access my spreadsheet, but do be mindful that this is a work in-progress so I am constantly updating it.