대항 린칭 서사 읽기: 리처드 라이트의 토박이

고강일(Kangyl Ko) 한국아메리카학회 2017 美國學論集 Vol.49 No.2

This essay reads Richard Wright’s Native Son as counter-lynching narrative in which he reasserts black manhood and represents the symbolic interracial working-class male bond by relegating black and white women to conduits of exchange between men, black and white. Reflective of the destruction of interracial working-class solidarity in the early twentieth-century United States, Native Son investigates the ways in which lynching narrative stigmatizes black male sexuality and offers its counter-lynching discourse. This essay addresses how the novel portrays black man as the universalized feature of racial oppression. By analyzing the protagonist Bigger‘s relationship with the white communist Jan, I contend that it is white and black women that function as the exchange objects over which white and black men can form a homosocial bond. This essay also explores misogyny and homophobia embedded in Wright’s portrayal of black manhood. Native Son renders the injurious effects of racism on black men as their feminization and homosexualization. My essay concludes that Wright’s text reinscribes masculine heteronormativity and marginalizes female and queer subjects.

모범적인 소수민, 아시아계 미국 남성성, 그리고 『미국 출생 중국인』

고강일 ( Ko Kangyl ) 영미문학연구회 2021 안과 밖 Vol.- No.50

This essay interrogates the model minority discourse and explores its counter-discourse in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006). Paying special attention to the historical context of racialization of Asian American men in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this essay sets out to investigates how such literary characters as Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan have developed American cultural biases against Asian American men. Pointing out that toxic racist narratives are intertwined with the model minority myth, this essay goes on to examine how Yang’s graphic novel challenges the model minority discourse of Asian American masculinity. American Born Chinese braids three different protagonists, each corresponding to a distinct narrative medium: the Monkey King (Chinse folklore), Jin (ethnic buildungsroman), and Danny/Chin-Kee (TV sitcom). My essay probes how all of the three stories examine the model minority myth and its attendant racialization of Asian American men. In doing so, I conclude that American Born Chinese asserts the conversion of the model minority into the “Asian American” as a new alternative discourse for Asian American men.

미국의 제국주의와 감상주의

고강일 ( Ko Kangyl ) 경희대학교 비교문화연구소 2019 비교문화연구 Vol.54 No.-

이 글에서는 미국의 제국주의적 기획과 그에 대한 대항 담론이 19세기 미국의 감상주의 문학을 전유하는 양상을 추적한다. 해리엇 비처 스토우의 『톰 아저씨의 오두막』과 필리핀의 식민지 상황에서 이 소설이 수용되는 과정을 살펴보면서, 스토우의 작품이 표상하는 가정성의 인종주의적인 함의를 규명한다. 그리고 카를로스 불로산의 『미국은 내 마음에』의 분석을 통해 20세기 초반 필리핀과 미국에서 제국주의적 가정성 담론이 관철되는 동시에 저항 받는 양상을 살펴본다. 특히 이 자전적 소설에서 필리핀 식민 주체가 “자애로운 동화” 담론과 협상하는 장면들을 집중적으로 분석하면서, 불로산의 텍스트가 제국주의적 가정성에 내포된 인종적이고 계급적 편견을 극복하는 양상을 조명한다. This essay explores the way in which American imperial policy and its counter discourse appropriate the nineteenth century American sentimental literature. I consider Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and its reception in the colonial context of the Philippines. In doing so, my essay critiques imperialistic impulses embedded in the politics of racialized domesticity advanced by Stowe's text. This essay then queries Carols Bulosan's semi-autobiographical novel, America Is in the Heart, in order to trace the trajectory of the discourse of American imperial domesticity in the early twentieth-century Philippines and the United States. Looking closely at Bulosan's portrayal of the Filipino colonial subject's negotiation with the discourse of “benevolent assimilation,” I read his novel as a cultural space in which the imperative of the racialized domesticity is endorsed or questioned. This essay concludes that America Is in the Heart offers a serious critique of racist and classed assumption of the imperial domesticity.

<인류의 아이들>에 나타난 인종, 섹슈얼리티, 그리고 흑인 여성의 몸

고강일 ( Kangyl Ko ) 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2018 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.26 No.2

Exploring the combined racialization and sexualization of African American females, this essay first examines American modern history in which black women have been deemed contrary to the norms of heterosexuality and white patriarchy. I consider how such cultural stigmatization of black women’s sexuality has served to justify their exploitation and oppression in modern American history. This essay then addresses Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), a cinematic adaptation of British novelist P.D. James's 1992 book of the same title, in order to investigate how the discursive violence enacted on black females has been challenged or applied to post 9.11 global culture. Paying attention to the film’s Americanization of James’s story such as obvious visual and verbal references to the US that are not in original, my essay explores how Cuarón’s cinematic text bears and interrogates the traces of white values and rhetorical strategies of American racial segregation. In this way, I analyze Children of Men as cultural space in which American racial and sexual discourses are questioned or articulated. My essay concludes that the film reinscribes the ideology of compulsory heteronormativity while powerfully criticizing the cultural logic of racial segregation.

정체성의 정치학, 퀴어 정치학, 그리고 미국소설 연구

고강일 ( Ko Kangyl ) 영미문학연구회 2018 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.45

Paying attention to the historical context of the 1980s and 1990s United States, I explore how gay and lesbian civil rights movement derived its ideological inspiration from the idea of identity politics. This essay also examines how the discourse of identity politics has fueled gay and lesbian criticism in American novel studies. In doing so, I argue that gay and lesbian criticism allied with identity politics has contributed to restore and make visible the presence of sexual minorities in American novels. In spite of such tremendous power wielded by the gay and lesbian reading practice as a means of affirming transgressive sexuality, however, the identity-driven literary criticism is described as reductive and circular, since its reading protocol has been usually indebted to the prominence of Lacanian concept of the phallus or a particular sexual orientation. In a similar vein, I investigate the incapacity of the gay and lesbian criticism to account for new ways of life and values portrayed in American novels. This essay concludes that the affiliation between queer politics and American novel studies offers a cultural space in which readers and critics are invited to imagine alternative types of love, alliance, and relationship that exist outside of “normal” markers of life experience such as marriage and reproduction.

아시아계 미국인 남성성의 (재)구성과 <단점들>

고강일(Kangyl Ko) 한국비평이론학회 2022 비평과이론 Vol.27 No.1

아시아계 미국인 남성성에 관한 담론들과 반담론들을 살펴보면서, 이 논문은 먼저 프랭크 친이나 제프리 폴 찬과 같은 아시아계 미국 남성 작가들의 주장을 살펴본다. 그들의 저작이“헤게모니적 남성성”의 관점에서 어떻게 아시아계 미국인의 남성성을 재정의하고 있는지를 고찰하고자 한다. 또한 아시아계 남성 작가들의 문화민족주의적인 담론이 내포하고 있는 여성혐오와 가부장적 충동을 추적한다. 논문의 후반부에서는 에이드리언 토미네가 2007년에 발표한 그래픽 노블인 <단점들>을 살펴보면서, 작품이 탈인종 미국 사회에서 아시아계 미국인 남성성의 위기를 어떻게 다루는지를 고찰한다. 토미네의 텍스트는 아시아계 남성 주인공인 벤의 인종적이고 성적인 불안을 묘사하면서, 그가 어떻게 스스로를 재남성화하고 있는지를 숙고한다. 본 논문은 아시아계 남성에 대한 악의적인 편견에 의해 왜곡되는 벤과 백인 여성과의 관계에 주목하면서, 아시아계 미국인 남성으로서 그가 겪는 고충이 탈인종 미국 사회에서 여전히 지속되는 인종분리의 문화적 논리를 반영하고 있다고 주장한다. 이 논문의 결론에서는 <단점들>이 인종주의적인 헤게모니적 남성성에 의존하지 않는 대안적 남성성을 제안하고 있다고 지적한다. Exploring discourses of Asian American masculinity and their counter-discourses, this essay first examines polemics of Asian American male writers, such as Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan. I consider how they attempt to redefine Asian American masculinity in terms of “hegemonic masculinity.” In doing so, this essay interrogates misogyny and the patriarchal impulse embedded in their cultural nationalist discursive project. This essay then considers Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel, Shortcomings (2007) and explores the way in which the book investigates the crisis of Asian American masculinity in a post-racial America. The graphic novel portrays racial and sexual insecurities of its Asian American male protagonist, Ben, and addresses how he tries to re-masculinize himself. Paying attention to how his relationships with white women are fraught with elements of toxic stereotypes of Asian American men, I argue that his struggle as an Asian American male is symptomatic of the continuing cultural logic of racial segregation in the post-racial United States. My essay concludes that Tomine’s graphic novel suggests an alternative masculinity that is not constructed upon racist hegemonic masculinity.

The Shape of Water와 냉전의 퀴어한 타자들

고강일 ( Ko Kangyl ) 동국대학교 영어권문화연구소 2024 영어권문화연구 Vol.17 No.1

This essay explores the 90th Academy Award for Best Picture winner The Shape of Water (2017), which portrays the unique romance between mute cleaner Elisa Esposito and a mysterious amphibian creature kidnapped from South America in the 1962 Baltimore. This essay first examines contemporary American society in which the nuclear family was perceived as the basic social unit through which American nation could survive in the Cold War's nuclear race. I also consider how the nuclear family was understood to be the inevitable social unit of consumption for durable consumer goods that drove economic growth in the United States. The second half of my paper addresses how The Shape of Water represents the way in which the Cold War liberalism served to establish the hegemony of contemporary middle class and marginalize social minorities in the 1960s American society. Employing the notion of queer as a challenge to heteronormative institutions and practices, I consider the way in which the film's minority characters represent queer alliance against racist heteronormative discourse that Colonel Strickland embodies. This paper also examines how the film challenges the dominant cultural politics in which ability and heterosexuality as social norms are bound intrinsically. In doing so, this paper concludes that The Shape of Water is a story of the Cold War's queer others.