Translating Resistance: Don Mee Choi, Jiyoon Lee, Eunsong Kim, and Others (original) (raw)
Related papers
Bad Subjects and the Transnational Minjung: The Poetry of Jason Koo and Ed Bok Lee
In light of Korean inclusion of its diaspora as part of the nation, a “creolized” approach that brings together constructions of the bad subject of Asian American studies with conceptions of the Korean minjung grounds an analysis of two poets as they might be considered from a bi-national, Korean and U.S. American, perspective. The poets Ed Bok Lee and Jason Koo show different ways of being the bad subject. Lee is clearly a bad American subject, resisting American white racial hegemony, and his poetry often addresses a kind of American minjung multiculturalism, as is shown in poems from his first two books Real Karaoke People and Whorled. He challenges some aspects of contemporary Korea, and might be a kind of Korean bad subject in those challenges. Koo, on the other hand, resists the call to bad subjectivity, so that his poetry may not fit the preferred paradigm of Asian American studies, as he recognizes. As he resists that paradigm, he also gives little attention to his Korean heritage, so his not-bad American subjectivity becomes bad Korea subjectivity. He recovers some measure of badness in the final poem of Man on Extremely Small Island when he connects briefly to his Korean heritage and his Asian American present. The creolized juxtaposition of the bad subject with the minjung suggests the use of these poems in considering both American and Korean society.
Fictions of Liberation: A Paradoxical “Palimpsest of Colonial Identity” ofChŏng(Jeong)
Journal of Pastoral Theology, 2018
Within Asian/American feminist theology, this article addresses specifically Korean/ American feminist theological discourse of chȏ ng. I argue that by employing racialized signifiers such as han and chȏ ng, we are marginalizing ourselves. Such discursive identity markers of Korean/American feminist theologians have been constructed by utilizing colonialist historiography and methods that the Japanese first used in their efforts to justify colonial rule of Korea (-), thereby reproducing and reinforcing the racialized discourses of the colonial era. This author implores Asian/American pastoral theologians to engage in a more critical, complex analysis of power during the period of Japanese colonial rule (-). I argue for the importance of historiographical analysis as being central to understanding how Korean/American theological identity came to embrace the cultural signifiers it does. Our task, then, as critical feminist liberation theologians is to engage in ongoing critiques and analyses of patri-kyriarchal power in colonialism(s) and imperialism(s) in order to dismantle its structures and influences.
Queer Fiction & Poetry of Modern South Korea: Rethinking Critical Thought
This paper seeks to compare the two different ways in which examples of recent Korean poetry and fiction can be ‘queer’. The poetry of Hwang Inch’an is found to be more ‘queer’ for its explorations of relationships between the narrator and natural subjects (such as birds), whereas the more explicit and sexually ‘queer’ work of Lee Ŭnmi is found also to queer the notions of traditional Korean family, nature, and smell. This paper also seeks to ‘define’ queer, applying this also to a South Korean, contemporary context. It examines both ‘Western’ and Korean contexts, as well as background on the writers themselves and how relevant this may be to the ‘queer’ qualities of their works.
show relational rifts and serve as a guide to ultimate reconciliation with kinship norms. The last chapter takes the study chronologically forward to the modern "breakdown of the (Chosȏn) genealogical subject" when a broad readership encountered kinship novels in the commercial book market as an alien blast from a bygone past. Chizhova deserves praise for presenting this corpus with great empathy and poignant close readings and trouvailles for her devotion to the philologically demanding study of this genre. If there is one point of criticism to offer it might be ideological bias: Chizhova's soldiering for the vernacularfemale-elite (against the Sinitic-male-demotic, in complex constellations) repeatedly creates artifacts in the genre's framing in the broader literary and cultural historical landscape. This bias can produce minor issues, such as the absence of discussion of these novels' "Chinese setting." More importantly, it leads to an overemphasis and lack of contextualization of the lineage novels in the complex spectrum of Chosȏn narrative and fiction, a much-debated desideratum for a proper premodern literary historiography of Korea. This might also explain the astonishing disinterest in the language and stylistic registers of these novels. The vibrant current debates about "Literary Sinitic" and the complex Sinitic-vernacular modulations across genres-a topic treated extensively and very productively in Si Nae Park's recent work The Korean Vernacular Story-remain unreferenced. 1 This lack of the genre's robust contextualization also appears in the broadest layer of this study: the "history" of the Korean novel. As much as the broadly thrown net of scholarship is praiseworthy , brief evocations of local insights on the "late imperial Chinese novel," European medieval literature, or Bedouin poetry easily result in randomly reductionist and essentializing statements on the Korean/Chinese/Western novel. Where is the infamous "Cartesian subject" in Don Quixote or even Rousseau's Emile? We need deeper analytic frameworks to figure out the complex phenomenon of early modern Korean fiction across vernacular and Sinitic registers. And we need to develop solid comparative practices. Only they can save us from fallacies induced by superficial "comparative aperçus" and get us to deeper questions about the respective divergent socioliterary worlds and linguistic efficacy of these works in their respective time and place. But overall, this book is a sophisticated and engaging study of early modern Korean lineage novels, and it is highly recommended to anybody with interest in premodern Korea and East Asia, the gender and language politics of literary traditions, and, incidentally, global histories of the novel, which we will need to, comparatively and responsibly, write in the future.
Jihee Han , 2022
This paper illustrates how a hybrid interpretive process can be deployed to refashion Korean humanities traditions for a global context. Han, a Korean reader-translator, and Chilton, an Anglophone reader, undertake a cross-cultural reading and a phenomenological interpretation of Sukyung Huh's Global Blues, an English translation of the collection of poems titled 빌어먹을, 차가 운 심장 in Korean. The purpose of conducting such a collaborative reading is to bring attention to two main points. First, it is crucial to acknowledge a translator's role in the authorship of a text since, more than merely making a copy of the original, he/she undertakes important critical judgments and creative interpretations to produce an original translation. Second, it is time for global Korean humanities studies to take on a more active role, rather than being simply a passive object of study. Han thus uses her translation to evaluate the trend toward the 'globalization' of Korean literature: she provides only the bare bones of Huh's biography and poetic themes, and then asks Chilton to read Global Blues and interpret this work by responding to the poems he finds most appealing. The result is exemplified by the title of this paper, "the pleasure of cross-cultural reading": two readers, originating from starkly contrasting positions, activating multiple viewpoints that transcend straightforward comparison, skimming off the hegemonic weight of Anglocentric interpretive frameworks and expanding their comparative vista toward global humanities studies.
This article compares selected poems of the Korean poet Moon Chung-Hee with those of women poets of Latin America’s modernist and post-modernist era in terms similar themes and intentions. The idea is to show that contemporary post-colonial female voices of such ostensibly dissimilar places as Latin America and South Korea have much in common. They explore universal questions and have come to their work, in large part, because of the changes in culture and gender roles that have taken place in their respective countries in recent decades. The temporal beginning of Latin American post-colonialism extends throughout the 19th century, while in South Korea it takes place in the 20th. This article is a translation of the forthcoming Spanish version published in Cuaderno internacional de estudios humanísticos y literatura of the University of Puerto Rico in Humacao (CIEHL: 2016, Vol. 23).
21st Century Korean American Poetry, The First Decade
The main purposes of this essay are to compile a bibliography of all the book-length collections of English-language Korean American poetry that have been published in the U.S. through 2017, to outline some possible means of categorizing or classifying the books, and to briefly introduce the work of each poet who published his or her first collection in the first decade of the 21st century. In suggesting various possibilities for categorizing these poets, I insist that none of those possibilities are definitive or absolute. From 1972 to 2017, 47 Korean American poets published 84 collections of poetry, 17 in the 20th century, 27 from 2000 to 2009, and 40 from 2010 to 2017. Key suggestions for classification include a poet’s generation in America, gender, themes, content, and aesthetic choices. The fruitful diversity of Korean American poetry reflects the state of American poetry in general. The extent to which the poets use or ignore their Korean heritage is part of that larger diversity but also shows a unique place in the various poetic and intellectual communities to which the writers might belong.