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Cultural Studies and Minority Literature in America

김성곤 1

1서울대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

For the past dew decades, Korean American writers’ immediate concern has been how to render the compelling diasporic experience of immigrants, and how to mediate the irreducible chasm between one’s indigenous cultural identity and the dominant culture that one must assimilate into. This is precisely what cultural studies, especially in the sphere of ‘cultural translation’ and ‘trans-cultural studies, has endeavored to explore for the past few years. As a first generation immigrant, for example, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s literary world is situated somewhere between her ethnic identity and the dominant culture, in which she is thrown as an existential heroine. Choosing any one of the two will inevitably result in losing the complex issues of socio-political as well as cultural change that take place in the psyche of the uprooted, living in an unfamiliar, often hostile, environment. That is why in Dictee (1982), Theresa Cha investigates the clashes between cultures and languages, which inevitably culminate in power politics between the dominant and the marginal ideology. Hopelessly exiled and uprooted from her own culture, the protagonist of Dictee has to write passively what is already spoken, and quietly copy what is already pronounced, as dictated, all in a foreign language. Nevertheless, Theresa Cha disrupts the linguistic norms and rules inherent in dictation that do not allow cultural interactions and diversity. With the spirit of diversity and defiance, she successfully converts Dictee into a “writerly text” as Barthes puts it, which invites active interpretation. It is exactly at this moment that Dictee achieves what we call “cultural translation” and “trans-cultural interaction.” The literary world of another representative Korean American writer, Chang-rae Lee, is also deeply rooted in the struggle of a spiritual exile who constantly sways like a pendulum at the threshold of two different cultures. In his first novel, “Native Speaker” Lee depicts a Korean-American who is a perpetual outsider who is alienated from the mainstream America and torn between the two worlds: Korea and America. The novel is about loyalty and betrayal, alienation and accommodation. It is about how to connect with the world rather than stand aloof from it. In his second novel, Don Lee, however, is radically different from them in the sense that he is deeply concerned not with the cultural or social alienation, but with the psychological problems one encounters while living in American society as a minority. Lee examines the predicament of Americans born of Asian parents in a predominantly Anglo-American society, and the irreducible hiatus and inevitable tensions often unnoticed by white Americans. Don Lee is unique in the sense that, instead of complaining about racial intolerance in American society, he has doggedly explored the possibilities of Asian Americans by redefining the concepts of difference and identity. He does not perceive ‘difference and identity’ as a crisis. Rather, he perceives them as a new possibility for Asian Americans living in multicultural America. While other Asian American writers are struggling with the more immediate problems of the first-generation immigrants such as language barriers, nostalgia, or acculturation, Lee focuses on more profound issues of the second or third generation immigrants. Yellow well illustrates this new insightful thematic concern of Don Lee’s that has significantly broadened the horizon of Asian American literature, thereby opening up a new field of cultural translation and trans-cultural studies.

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