How were concepts of the human's genus-being operative in the discourses of the Japanese empire? How did they inform the imagination and representation of modernity in colonial Korea? This title deals with these queries.

"Imperial Genus is an expansive and erudite study of Culturalism, Marxism, and Japanophone discourses across colonial Korea and imperial Japan. Nothing exists in Korean studies that is remotely close to the breadth and depth of the scholarship and theoretical sophistication in Travis Workman's book. It offers three related investigations: the philosophical substrata of modern thought and culture in the colony and Japan proper, their ideological underpinnings and implications, and a thorough reinterpretation of the colonial Korean literary canon from these perspectives."--Jin-kyung Lee, author of Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea

"Travis Workman's compelling arguments take as their point of departure the notion of genus-being. Workman dispenses once and for all with the colonizer/colonized binary, demonstrating brilliantly how intellectuals associated with different movements in both Japan and Korea grapple with the meaning of the human itself as they attempt to think through capitalist modernity."--Theodore Hughes, author of Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom's Frontier
"Travis Workman's project is no less than a rewriting of modern intellectual history as a site of translation. An analysis that powerfully demonstrates the possibilities for a revitalized comparativism opened up by postcolonial theory and the critique of Orientalism, it will be essential reading for a new generation of scholars of East Asia."--Brett de Bary, Professor, Cornell University