인종과 동물 2: 전용의 정치학과 탈전용의 윤리학

김준년(Junyon Kim) 한국아메리카학회 2018 美國學論集 Vol.50 No.1

The topic of race and animal is among few issues that go unexplored, because the two are too sensitive to bring together on the same discursive space, even though one is so easily linked with the other on the daily basis in America. Recently, animal studies reach a consensus on the need for a zoē-based bioegalitarian turn. As the Ferguson unrest and Childish Gambino music video indicate, race returns in the so-called post-racial era. Under the critical rubric of race and animal, my discussion starts from a question of why the baboons do not appear as named characters in the movie Planet of the Apes, both its original series and its reboot trilogy. And I explain why this question matters by comparing how humans have appropriated animals with how white people have appropriated black people and their images in the antebellum America and now. To break the vicious circle of the morphological normativity which affects our sense of race and animals, I offer a way of post-appropriation. By post-appropriation, I mean any efforts to liberate ourselves from the view that refers to otherness within ourselves as otherness itself. For this purpose, I argue that the post-appropriation should go hand in hand with anti-anthropocentrism and post-Eurocentrism.

고차 지향적 서사 전략과 화자의 지향적 변신: 인지비평적 관점에서 『인간의 오점』 다시 읽기 1

김준년 ( Junyon Kim ) 미국소설학회 2024 미국소설 Vol.31 No.1

This paper has two aims: First, to approach the passing narrative of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain from the mind-reading perspective of Cognitive Criticism; secondly, to resolve the narrative inconsistency or contradiction by applying the intentionality theory to the relationship between the novelist and his/her first-person narrator. For this purpose, I have recourse to the two mutually supplementary sources, that is, the theoretical base of Daniel Dennett’s cognitive philosophy and the practical way of Lisa Zunshine’s novel-reading as mind-reading. In this cognitive context, the high-stakes role play of passing which enters into the “skin” of other humans can be reconsidered as a game between intentional systems drawing on what Dennett calls higher order intentionality. By the same or somewhat extended token, Zuckerman’s decision to launch the book entitled The Human Stain is to be interpreted as the narrator’s provocative proposal to invite the author to a risky intentionality game. Then I suggest that the narrator who breaks through the homodiegetic conventions and transforms into a heterodiegetic one should be called a higher-order intentional system that can hop out of the author’s brain.

자동인형, 로봇, 인공지능의 “낯익은/낯선” 신체화에 내장된 인지적 타자성

김준년 ( Junyon Kim ) 미국소설학회 2021 미국소설 Vol.28 No.2

This paper takes three critical positions. First, as a posthuman extension of the cognitive literary and cultural studies, it interrogates the anthropocentric implications in the embodiment of automaton, robot and artificial intelligence. Secondly, as an ethical intervention in technological achievements, it calls into question the pretext of progress and priority. Thirdly, as a minority criticism, it challenges the ruse of white-male domination in the realm of magic and science. In order to make visible the hidden mechanism behind the A.I. and android embodiments, I attempt to connect Jentsch’s and Freud’s old notion of the uncanny with the new concept of the creepy in the New Media. Given these theoretical intersections, I examine the curious conditions of the machine becoming able to see, which range from Moth and Bedbug, Elmer and Elsie, Shaky and Herbert to the fictional HAL 9000 and T-800. Making a case for the machine becoming (un)able to think, I look into both the inside and outside of Kempelen’s Chess-Player, Deep Blue and AlphaGo. Finally, discussing whether or not some androids have crossed the Uncanny Valley and why they can’t cross it, I argue for the highly complex embodiment of androids who dream of a relief in the morning.

인지와 인종 1: 인지과학적 문학연구와 문화연구의 “오싹한” 전망

김준년 ( Junyon Kim ) 미국소설학회 2020 미국소설 Vol.27 No.3

This paper is a critical attempt to let race be seen in cognitive literary and cultural studies. The strategy of making race visible in cognitive sciences is definitely a double-edged sword. However, insofar as the location of race is found not to be null and void but to be significant and supplementary, it is worth exploring some ways in which the cognitive approach may enter into a productive dialogue with identity politics. For the purpose of laying the groundwork for a cognitive reexamination of race issues, I come up with three relevant questions: first, what is cognition?; second, why race matters in the cognitive process?; thirdly, what is at issue in cognitive criticism? In my answer to the first question, I suggest that race should be considered as a variable in the cognitive process which is characterized as unconscious and pre-/unreflective. In order to answer the sensitive second question, drawing on such concepts as levels of intentionality and Theory of Mind, I analyze how higher intentionality often results in too much of a cognitive load in US race relations. Particularly in terms of race and public space in American society, I try to find a common cognitive problem in three black men’s terrible cases: Homer Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson, Bigger Thomas of Native Son, and George Floyd against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement. Regarding the third comprehensive inquiry, I look into the bias and limitations of the scholars who have preoccupied the territory of cognitive criticism. I also deal with the political issue of cognitive universals. Finally, looking upon the strange bedfellows of cognition and race as a (com)promising couple, I map out possible scenarios and model plans for creating a feel-so-good morning of criticism.

인종과 포스트휴먼: 비판적 분석

김준년 ( Junyon Kim ) 미국소설학회 2018 미국소설 Vol.25 No.2

My critical analysis of race and the posthuman examines the problems and limitations of the current posthuman discourse and its conceptualization of posthumanism from a revisionist perspective on humanism and humanity. Three assumptions are required for this purpose. First, I regard the prefix post- as signifying a complex atemporal procedure, rather than seeing it as a sign of a linear chronology. Thus the human and the posthuman are not only allowed to coexist in ever-changing configurations, but they are also supposed to affect each other reciprocally. Second, I assume that the general posthuman condition is not upon us yet. In this sense, most of the posthuman situations would be investigated in the future tense. Third, I see to it that race should not be omitted in the discussion about the human and posthuman conditions as well. Based on this revised critical position, this paper reviews what is at issue in the two genealogies of the posthuman discourse, a transhumanist version of posthumanism and the critical posthumanism. Paying due attention to the ways in which the critical posthumanism has been dealt with by such scholars as Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and N. Katherine Hayles, to name a few, I attempt to envision how the posthuman subject can be re-embodied and how the posthuman space can be produced.

미국 흑인문학의 인종 가로지르기: 미국인 되기의 정치학과 백인 되지 않기의 윤리학

김준년 ( Junyon Kim ) 미국소설학회 2016 미국소설 Vol.23 No.2

When President Obama made a White House spokesman confirm that he has checked the box that says “Black, African Am., or Negro” in the 2010 census, it signalled that a representative American has declared his racial identity on the basis of a politics of the performative which goes beyond the binary opposition between essentialism and constructivism. In order to examine Obama’s census choice of African American, I come up with a concept of ‘the traversing of race,’ which is borrowed from the theory of fantasy in Lacanian psychoanalysis. I also draw on queer criticism so as to elaborate the concept of ‘the traversing of race’ as a citational performing of one’s ethnic identity. Obama’s ‘traversing of race’ can be compared to the Jewish-American Adam Sandler’s performance of the Chanukah Song series. The hilarious lyrics of Sandler’s Chanukah songs celebrate a Jewish ‘coming-out’ festivity which enables American Jews to overcome their divided subject position between inclusion and distinctiveness. Historically, it is W. E. B. Du Bois’s formula of double-consciousness that is concerned with ‘the traversing of race’ in the earliest politico-ethical context of becoming American and not becoming white. Du Bois’s insight into the future of race in America is helpful in figuring out how mixed-race people should negotiate the politics of identity against the backdrop of multicultural America. Unlike mixed-race characters who can pass for white in the late 19th- and early 20th-century situations, mixed-race characters of what a critic calls “new millenium passing novel” are less or no longer suffering from the identity crisis related to neurosis, depression, or schizophrenia, even though a subtle racism is not over. Seen from this post-racial perspective, new millenium mixed-race people are not necessarily afraid of traversing race. With the overall trope of performativity, Barack Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, successfully signifies the way in which a mixed-race American confirms his ever-ongoing identity.

아프로-미래주의로 재고찰한 조지 스카일러의 할렘 르네상스 풍자소설 『블랙 노 모어』

김준년 ( Junyon Kim ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2023 현대영미소설 Vol.30 No.3

This paper is a critical attempt to reexamine the narrative strategies of George Schuyler’s satirical Harlem Renaissance novel Black No More through the twin lenses of Afrofuturism and speculative fiction. Seen from the Afrofuturist perspective, Black No More can be positioned as an earliest example of the speculative fiction written by an African American author. The extrapolation upon which Black No More is based shows that a technological novum called the Black-No-More process turns black people white. As a consequence, the racial metamorphosis plunges the black population into chaos and simultaneously upsets the entire American social order. To elaborate on this chaotic landscape of future America, I have recourse to Afrofuturism which can broach the long-delayed conversation about race and science fiction. Also inquiring into the America’s racial irony represented in the ending of this black speculative fiction, I argue that Black No More dares to run the risk of self-making in the unknown time and space of future America.

인종과 동물 1: 동물 담론과 진화생물학의 쟁점과 허점

김준년 ( Junyon Kim ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2018 현대영미소설 Vol.25 No.1

In the criticism of American literature and culture, animal studies have been rarely associated with African-American studies, even though both of the disciplines share a common ground of victimhood, that is, speciesism and racism. It is well known that The Lives of Animals, which is contributed by J. M. Coetzee and five other like-minded scholars, puts on the table a bunch of controversial issues about humanity and animality. Re-reading the text about humans and animals, what I found interesting is the viability of a combination of animal discourse and racial discourse. What is integral to this uncharted critical cooperation is a post-anthropocentrist perspective. With this in mind, tracing animal discourses in Western thought which range from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas via Descartes and Jeremy Bentham to Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, I examine where the issue of race can be properly inserted into them and how the issue of race is productively engaged with them. Then, exploring the ways in which the factor of race has operated in evolutionary biology, I attempt to divulge the complicated relationship between racism and speciesism. For this purpose, rather than doing somewhat scientific researches into evolutionary biology per se, I pay attention to the evolutionary biologists’ ways of approaching to the issues of race and species, particularly focusing on the views and values of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins. In closing, I discuss why the post-anthropocentrism matters for beings of a particular animal as well as beings of human others, and finally I come up with a possible scenario for the joyful encounter that transcends both species and racial boundaries.

민중의 회귀―미국흑인에 현존하는 사건적 강도

김준년 ( Junyon Kim ) 한국영어영문학회 2017 영어 영문학 Vol.63 No.2

This paper originated in my concern with the Ferguson unrest which was intrigued by the death of Michael Brown. Looking carefully into its particular case of police brutality and black criminality, I take the Ferguson unrest seriously in conjunction with the French philosopher Alain Badiou`s thought about event and truth. Then I pay further attention to Badiou`s engagement with the Arab Spring in 2011. Reading closely his The Rebirth of History, I compare the nation-wide development of the Ferguson unrest to Badiou`s theorization of historical riot. On this basis, I argue that the Ferguson unrest can be seen as a significant example of the Badiouian historical riot. In the third section of my paper, I go so far as to bring about the difference between the quality of being and the intensity of being in the discursive context of race and being. To search for philosophical answer to the critical question of why Black Lives Matter, I examine Gilles Deleuze`s conceptualization of intensity as a key term to a fuller understanding of difference and repetition. Finally, I put on the table such a sensitive issue as the African-American collective identity. Considering the post-racial call of the Obama presidency, I as non-black African-Americanist suggest that it is high time for black America to go beyond the conventional harbor of race and class into a new peoplehood. For African Americans have many reasons to claim their subject position as a people and thus to make a pivotal contribution to a return of people.

인종과 유전: 게놈 시대에 은폐된 인종의 자리

김준년(Junyon Kim) 한국아메리카학회 2017 美國學論集 Vol.49 No.3

This essay concerns itself with the insidious return of race in the post-racial era of America. Perhaps most insidious is the way in which the vestigial remains of race come back in the field of health and medicine after the Human Genome Project is completed. Ironically, by redefining race as a biological category written in the genome, biotechnologies have undermined not only the scientific manifesto that human beings are 99.9 percent the same but also a hopeful anticipation that race may not be identified in our genes. Given such circumstances, I attempt to investigate how race is reappropriated in genetics, pharmacogenomics, and DNA-related biotechnology. For this purpose, I look carefully into the birth of BiDil which was approved as the first “race-specific” drug by the FDA in 2005. Conceding that BiDil was legally and commercially constructed as a “race-specific” drug, I come up with the three reasons of why BiDil did not end up in a total fiasco. Then drawing on Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of noso-politics and bio-politics, I elaborate on the discourse of race and public health, which should be reconfigurated in the context of biocitizenship.