Revisiting Transnational American Studies: Race and the Whale in Melville’s Moby-Dick

강연훤 한국영어영문학회 2018 영어 영문학 Vol.64 No.4

Over the last three decades, the field of American Studies has increasingly paid attention to transnational approaches in an effort to diversify and expand the field’s concerns beyond the narrow sense of the nation-state in today’s globalizing world. Yet, the mediation of the transnational requires a careful analysis of the nation that is still in transit. In this context, this essay examines Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick (1851) as a case study that vividly shows how reading American literature and culture through transnationalism not only offers new interpretations of canonical texts, but also helps us to better understand the historical roots and cultural contexts of contemporary issues such as global labor and migration, US citizenship and racial justice. To address the complexity of the text’s circulation and reproduction, coupled with US national ideology and cultural conditions, I first turn to the canonization of Melville’s Moby-Dick during the Cold War era as a national project and then explore the possibilities of transnational readings by focusing on the politics of race and global capitalism in the nineteenth century whaling industry. In doing so, I argue that critical transnationalism allows readers to keep questioning about their own understanding of race, nation, and cultural identity while remaining attentive to the destructive force of US imperialism and global capitalism in the twenty-first century.

Race and Transnational Solidarity in Langston Hughes’s Travel Writing

강연훤 한국현대영미소설학회 2022 현대영미소설 Vol.29 No.1

This essay asks how Langston Hughes’s travel writing can provide a point of entry to a critical understanding of race and black transnationalism. While critics have traditionally approached Hughes’s I Wonder as I Wander as an embodiment of his conflicted ideas about black nationalism and a more universal sense of class struggle in the 1930s, recent scholarship attends to the global dimensions of the text and its impact on decolonial knowledge production across cultural borders. Building on Shu-mei Shih’s notion of “comparative racialization,” this essay examines how Hughes’s travel narrative enables us to apprehend the meaning of race and its influence on racial others and the poor on a global scale. By juxtaposing Hughes’s transatlantic and transpacific experiences in I Wonder as I Wander, I argue that Hughes employs transnational solidarity as a new cultural form that envisions critical utopianism and global networks against racism. Finally, this essay shows that his travel writing has shaped and continues to shape the idea of race and black diaspora as a set of contradictory and evolving practices for building more just futures that value racial and social equality.

투어리즘의 윤리: 자메이카 킨케이드와 포스트콜로니얼 환경비평

강연훤 문학과환경학회 2019 문학과 환경 Vol.18 No.3

This essay examines how Jamaica Kincaid’s writing enables us to apprehend invisible environmental threats posed by what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence” by imaginatively situating the reader in a remote area and distant time via narratives. While North American mainstream ecocriticism has tended to highlight the idea of preserving wilderness based on the principles and philosophy of deep ecology since its inception in the 1990s, postcolonial ecocriticism rather asks us to explore the intersections between nature and culture, local and global to show that place-based ecocriticism is used to maintain the status quo of empire and global capitalism. By focusing on the relationship between tourism and empire and its legacies in the global South, this essay demonstrates how Kincaid’s nonfiction A Small Place (1988) uncovers the links between the Caribbean’s recent rise as a destination for global tourism and the history of slavery and plantation agriculture in the region, often difficult to see due to the workings of time and cultural amnesia. Ultimately, building on Nixon’s notion of “slow violence” and theories of postcolonial ecocriticism, I suggest that literature can serve as a vehicle for environmental activism that broadens and enriches the reader’s perception of the environment and human complexity across time and space and thus sow the seeds of the Utopian imagination for the more-than-human world. 이 글은 포스트콜로니얼 환경비평의 관점에서 캐리비안계 미국인 작가인 자메이카 킨케이드(Jamaica Kincaid)의 논픽션 『어느 작은 섬』(A Small Place, 1988)에 나타난 투어리즘과 신자유주의, 제국주의의 잔재 그리고 환경문제의 교차점에 대해서 고찰하고자 한다. 기존의 북아메리카와 유럽을 중심으로 형성되어온 주류 환경담론이 인간의 손이 닿지 않은 야생의 자연을 이상화하고 이를 보존, 보호하는 것에 중점을 두었다면, 2000년대 중후반부터 부상하기 시작한 포스트콜로니얼 환경비평(postcolonial ecocriticism)은 서구 계몽주의 인식론에 바탕을 둔 자연과 인간이란 이분법적인 사고와 심층생태학의 낭만적 자연관을 거부하고 환경담론의 역사화와 문화적 다양성을 강조한다. 킨케이드의 『어느 작은 섬』은 이러한 포스트콜로니얼 환경의식을 바탕으로 현재 글로벌 투어리즘의 발전과 과거 캐리비안의 노예제 사이의 역사적 인과관계뿐만 아니라 안티구아의 자연환경과 현지인들의 삶을 위협하는, 잘 보이지 않는 환경파괴에 의한 “느린 폭력”의 위험성에 대해서 문학적 상상력을 통해 독자에게 선명하게 보여준다. 이 글의 전반부에서는 닉슨의 “느린 폭력”과 포스트콜로니얼 환경비평이 그동안 북아메리카와 유럽을 중심으로 형성되어온 제 1세계의 환경담론이 지닌 문제점과 한계를 어떻게 비판하며, 캐리비안의 작은 섬인 안티구아뿐만 아니라 지구상 어딘 가에 존재하는 약소국의 자연환경과 사람들을 위한 새로운 담론을 제시하는지에 대해서 논의할 것이다. 이어지는 후반부에서는 킨케이드의 『어느 작은 섬』에서 다루어지는 투어리즘과 제국주의의 역사, 환경문제의 연관성에 대해서 닉슨의 “느린 폭력”이란 개념을 통해 고찰함과 동시에 킨케이드가 문학적 상상력을 현실사회의 부조리와 문제점을 변화시킬 수 있는 실천적인 윤리적 행위로서 어떻게 활용하고 있는지에 대해서 살펴볼 것이다. 궁극적으로 이 글은 상상력을 통해 낯선 곳, 타인의 삶을 탐험하는 문학이라는 ‘가상의 여행’이 독자/여행자의 인식의 변화를 이끌어낼 수 있으며, 이는 더 나아가 ‘윤리적인 여행’이라는 현실 삶의 변화를 가져올 수 있는 효과적인 매체가 될 수 있음을 밝히는데 그 목적이 있다.

팬데믹 시대의 미국 아웃도어 문화읽기: 자연의 사유화와 커뮤니티 가드닝

강연훤 문학과환경학회 2023 문학과 환경 Vol.22 No.4

In a moment of global environmental crises like pandemic, what does it mean for us to think about the privatization of nature and the use of nature as a public good? Focusing on American TV series Yellowstone (2018), this essay analyzes contemporary US outdoor culture that embodies the nation’s old, fraught relationship with nature and the history of Native dispossession in creating so called “wilderness discourse.” By critically reading the exclusion of racial bodies in the narrative of American environmentalism represented in Yellowstone, the essay highlights how the myth of American frontier has functioned to justify white settlers’land ownership and the exploitation of nature and racial others. Huge popularity of Yellowstone during the pandemic when racial justice protests like Black Lives Matter(BLM) were so high fundamentally asks us to consider the following questions: What owns nature? Who can be included, or excluded, in the making of American garden? Attentive to various environmental relations in Yellowstone, the article highlights urban gardening as an open-source platform to propose new ways to read contemporary environmental art and culture that work to integrate local communities into a larger picture of environmental narratives. After briefly examining recent pandemic gardening projects in the US, the article suggests the need to create a new environmental consciousness that seeks to build a community not bound by the privatization of nature and market ideology, but by shared ideas for planetary health and sustainable futures.

캘리포니아 농업과 음식정의: 존 스타인벡과 엘레나 마리아 비라몬테스의 환경시민권

강연훤 ( Yeonhaun Kang ) 미국소설학회(구 한국호손학회) 2020 미국소설 Vol.27 No.2

Through an analysis of two cultural works of California agriculture between the Great Depression and contemporary neoliberalism, this essay proposes that American agrarianism brings with it a new set of social, historical, and racial questions about US citizenship and environmental rights. Building on the new scholarship of environmental justice and critical race studies, the first part of the essay analyzes how John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) was both motivated and structured by the desire to possess the land to claim US citizenship: regenerating white masculinity through acquiring the land based on the racial logics of the notion of private property while making “invisible subjects” (e.g. people of color and immigrants) who are not suitable for the land and environmental stewardship. The second part of the essay turns to Mexican American writer Helena Maria Viramontes’s novel Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) as a crucial environmental justice text that writes back against the proliferation of US environmental racism and infrastructural violence. Viramontes’s narrative, I argue, complicates and keeps questioning about our understanding of race, environment, citizenship, and human health in an effort to help us see the invisible links between the exploitation of migrant farm workers and the uneven distribution of environmental risks in the food system. For both Steinbeck and Viramontes, literature functions as a way to challenge social and environmental injustice, though it also shows their somewhat self-contradictory and problematic understanding of environmental citizenship.

인류세의 글쓰기

강연훤(Yeonhaun Kang) 한국비평이론학회 2023 비평과이론 Vol.28 No.1

본 연구는 아시아계 미국인 작가인 루스 오제키(Ruth Ozeki)의 세 번째 소설 『시간 존재를 위한 이야기』(A Tale for the Time Being, 2013)를 중심으로 어떻게 인간 사회의 사회구조적 문제와 폭력의 역사가 환경오염과 생태계 위협과 같은 환경문제와 밀접하게 연결되어 있는지 살펴보고자 한다. 전통적인 서구의 자연관이 인간과 자연이란 이분법적인 인식론에 바탕을 둔 반면 인류세의 도래는 이러한 이항대립적인 서구 계몽주의 인식론의 한계를 선명하게 보여줌과 동시에 인간중심주의에서 벗어나 인간과 비인간이 함께 하는 세상을 담을 수 있는 다양한 종(multispecies)을 위한 새로운 내러티브의 필요성을 역설한다. 기존의 환경 문학연구와 담론이 미국을 중심으로 형성된 문학 텍스트와 이론, 대지와 인간행위자를 중심으로 한 서사에 치중해왔다면, 오제키는 『시간 존재를 위한 이야기』에서 비인간 대상자인 ‘바다’(the ocean)를 서사의 주요한 행위자로 등장시킴으로써 인류의 역사와 함께, 동시에 그보다 더 오랜 시간 동안 지구에 존재해온 해양의 역사를 같이 서술함으로써 인간과 비인간이란 경계를 허무는 해체적 글쓰기와 열린 사고를 보여준다. 특히, 오늘날의 환경문제가 특정한 지역, 국가의 범주(nation-state) 안에만 국한되는 것이 아니라 전 지구적·초국가적인 범주로 확장되고 있는 사실을 고려할 때, 환경 문학을 통한 다양한 스펙트럼의 인간 사회에 대한 이해와 비인간 주체들에 대한 재고는 인류세를 살아가야 하는 우리에게 필요한 보다 윤리적이고 통섭적인 시각을 제시해준다. By situating “transpacific” as a critical space that allows oceanic exchange between Japan and Canada, the past and the present, and human and nonhuman, this essay critically examines how Ozeki’s third novel, A Tale for the Time Being (2013), helps us apprehend “slow violence,” one that is hard to see or feel due to the workings of time and distant locations. While mainstream Anthropocene discourse has tended to focus more on the perspectives of white elites, writers and scientists based in the Global North, Ozeki’s novel draws the reader’s attention to the fluidity of oceanic movements and intentionally blurs the boundaries between human history and environmental history, especially the links between nuclear bombing in Japan during the World War II and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011, in order to emphasize a complex crisis for both human and nonhuman on a planetary scale. Building on what Elizabeth DeLoughrey terms “the oceanic turn” in literatary studies, I argue that Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being challenges and works to decolonize the discourses of the Anthropocene and thus invites us to imagine more just and sustainable environmental futures for the more-than-human world.

냉전시대와 미국의 푸드시스템: 전후 미국의 문화, 젠더, 소비주의

강연훤 ( Yeonhaun Kang ) 한국영미문화학회 2017 영미문화 Vol.17 No.1

This essay investigates how the industrialization of the US food system was closely linked to US foreign policy, gender issues, and the rise of consumerism in the Cold War era. While many scholars in American studies and women`s studies over the past few decades have paid increasing attention to the interrelationship of gender politics and the media industry in shaping US domesticity, they have seldom studied how and why reading gender issues in relation to environmental discourse in general and the industrialized US food system in particular can help us better understand the complex relationship between environmental and social problems that we are facing today, both collectively and individually. In this context, this essay shows how US national politics have not only created the ideal of American domesticity that promotes traditional gender roles and consumerism at the expense of gender equality, but also negatively affected women`s somatic and mental health writ large. By closely examining the cultural implications of Nixon`s and Khrushchev`s Kitchen Debate in the 1950s alongside newspapers, photographs, advertisements, and Sylvia Plath`s The Bell Jar (1963), I argue that reading Cold War consumer culture in relation to the US food system leads readers to see the invisible links between gender politics and today`s environmental and social problems in comparative and global contexts.