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Circulating Chinatown: The Translation of Ellen-ui Gong (1921) and the Discourse of Chinese Othering in the Transpacific Circuit

  • Journal of Popular Narrative
  • 2026, 32(2), pp.457~513
  • DOI : 10.18856/jpn.2026.32.2.013
  • Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : May 10, 2026
  • Accepted : June 15, 2026
  • Published : June 30, 2026

YUJUNG LEE 1

1연세대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how the discourse of Yellow Peril and Chinese othering, originally produced within early twentieth-century American popular culture, circulated to colonial Korea through translation. It focuses on Kim Dong-sung’s serialized Korean translation of Arthur B. Reeve’s The Exploits of Elaine, published in the Dong-A Ilbo in 1921 under the title Ellen-ui Gong (<엘렌의 功>). By doing so, this paper aims to demonstrate through a concrete case that the discourse of Chinese othering was shaped simultaneously along the transpacific imperial circuits. Grounded on the premise that American Chinatown Orientalism and the Japanese Empire’s discourse of Chinese othering were part of a resonant representational system within a transnational imperial network, this study extends Kellen Hoxworth’s transoceanic circulation of blackface into the context of East Asian translation. The second part analyzes the racialized representation of Long Sin and Chinatown in the original text within the context of the American Yellow Peril discourse following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It also examines the intersection of race and gender embodied by the “New Woman” Elaine, as well as the internal threat structured by the white male villain. Section 3 examines Kim Dong-sung’s translation strategies through a textual comparison. It analyzes how Orientalism is refracted across three levels: the translator’s explanatory interventions, the displacement of the speaking subject, and the cultural conditions of the target audience. Furthermore, it elucidates how the American Chinatown narrative overlapped with the Japanese Empire’s discourse of Chinese othering and the perception of the Chinese in colonial Korea. The significance of this study lies in proving that translation was not a passive reception of Western discourses, but a complex arena of cultural negotiation within the circulation of imperial racial discourses. Moving beyond the linear diffusion model of cultural imperialism, this study shows that the displacement of discourse through translation always entails recontextualization. Ultimately, it offers theoretical implications by expanding Hoxworth’s Anglophone-centric framework into the East Asian translational pathways.

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