지방색 소설에 나타난 소설주의

육성희 숙명여자대학교 1999 원우논총 Vol.17 No.-

Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter: Internment and Psychoracial Development

육성희 한국현대영미소설학회 2013 현대영미소설 Vol.20 No.3

The Japanese internment was the legitimate, political, and material manifestation of racism the American government inflicted on Japanese Americans. As the institutionalized form of racism, the internment is the main wound that causes the collective silence of Japanese Americans to be formed. The collective silence of Japanese Americans is getting more complicated as the internees live with the desire to be accepted into mainstream society and encounter their constant refusal. Hence, to examine the nature of their silence is to examine its relation to the racism inflicted on the Japanese Americans. My exploration of Sone’s Nisei Daughter focuses on the process of the young narrator's psychoracial development. Exploring the process of her racial awakening, this paper examines the constructing process of the collective silence of the Japanese internees and deals with the psychological interactions of the internees with American racism, assimilation, and their Japaneseness. Drawing on psychoanalysis and trauma studies, this paper will provide crucial insights into the psychological responses of the internees towards their Yankee and Japanese ideals.

레너드 장의 『식료품점』에 나타난 한국계 미국인의 인종화와 인종적 위치

육성희 서울대학교 미국학연구소 2022 미국학 Vol.45 No.2

This paper explores the process of racialization, and the racial position, of Korean Americans revealed through the Korean-Black conflict in Leonard Chang’s The Fruit ‘N Food. Racial discourses such as ‘model minority myth,’ ‘yellow peril,’ and ‘middleman minority theory’ capture the cultural and ethnic characteristics of Asian Americans while shaping them into stereotypical racial images. Drawing on these racial discourses, this paper examines how the 1st generation characters in the novel are formed as a race group and how 2nd generation character Tom confronts the racialization process and negotiates over his Korean American identity. By examining the Korean-Black conflict within the racism and racial hierarchy of American society, this paper investigates the racial position of Korean (Asian) Americans which forms a racial triangulation between Blacks and Whites and visualizes Whiteness and White power which has been invisible throughout the novel.

LA 폭동 다시 보기: 『너의 집이 대가를 치를 것이다』에 나타난 애도와 정의의 문제

육성희 한국영어영문학회 2023 영어 영문학 Vol.69 No.4

This paper delves into the portrayal of racial injustice in Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, examining how American society remembers its racial Other, particularly through the prism of mourning and justice. Inspired by the killing of Latasha Harlins, a pivotal event of the LA riots in 1992, the novel explores the enduring impact of this tragedy on the surviving family members in 2019. The narrative weaves the past events of Ava Matthews, a fictional representation of Latasha Harlins, with the present-day death of Alfonso Curiel. It reveals a stark contrast in the treatment of their untimely deaths by the society—some deaths are considered worthy of mourning, while others are overlooked. This study explores the question of whose deaths American society considers worthy of mourning, focusing on the victim narratives of Ava and Alfonso. The exploration of their unmourned deaths is examined in relation to their precarious lives as Black individuals experiencing life as denizens deprived of the civil rights that all people should enjoy equally. Drawing on the mourning theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida, the paper investigates the societal context influencing the decision to mourn or disregard the deaths of the racialized Other. Ava and Alfonso serve as poignant examples of how racial injustices persist even in death. This paper contends that the failure to mourn the death of the racial Other signifies a broader failure to acknowledge and accept the Other as they are—an act of discrimination that perpetuates the Other as eternally marginalized.

(Re)membering Trauma: Joy Harjo’s Prose Poetry and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee

육성희 대한영어영문학회 2016 영어영문학연구 Vol.42 No.4

Yook, Sung Hee. “(Re)membering Trauma: Joy Harjo’s Prose Poetry and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee.” Studies in English Language & Literature 42.4 (2016): 71-90. Both Joy Harjo's prose poetry and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee deal with historical memories resulting from traumatic events including colonialism, genocide, displacement, racism, and so on. These two women remember these traumatic histories by writing long poems, which, as Susan Stanford Friedman points out, are a very important tool for marginalized subjects to claim their status of subject and recover agency. Transcending the established binary between lyric and narrative, the lyric narrative and prose poetry used by Harjo and Cha evokes and historicizes their hidden and silenced stories and experiences. This paper is particularly interested in the ways Harjo, a Native American poet, views the past as connected to the present and the future, and Cha, a Korean American avant-garde artist, displays how traumatic memories are formed and characterized through her fragmented, broken, and disintegrated language, attempting to revive traumatic remnants of the past through a diseuse. This paper also emphasizes how Harjo and Cha politically take part in the struggle against the colonial power of the dominant discourses and the symbolic order of reality. (Sookmyung Women’s University)

Bonded Slavery and Gender in Mahasweta Devi’s“Douloti the Bountiful”

육성희 숙명여자대학교 아시아여성연구원 2018 Asian Women Vol.34 No.1

This paper explores the ways tribals are entrapped in and exploited as bonded laborers and prostitutes in Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful” by the deep-rooted socio-economic evil of debt-bondage. Tribals, once lived in forest and mountain areas with distinctive cultures and self-sufficient economic systems, were displaced and dispossessed from their forest lands/homes by the British Empire’s large-scale deforestation and the independent Indian government’s projects of forest clearing and land conversion. Catapulted without preparation into the patriarchal, capitalist society, they are frequently lured by landowners/ moneylenders into the debt trap: Once in debt, escape is nearly impossible because of high compound interest rates, leading them to work for their moneylender as bonded slaves. These changes in social and economic relations transform tribals’ social status from freemen to wage laborers, debtors, bonded laborers, bonded prostitutes, and ultimately bonded slaves. This transformation in turn destroys their familial and communal relations, preventing them from performing their parental roles as breadwinners and caregivers. This paper investigates these changes in identities and roles of tribals through an exploration of Devi’s fictionalized villages, and the gendered division of labor represented by the exploitation of tribal men and women in the novella. Finally, dealing with the significance of Douloti’s death as the abject, this paper considers possible antidotes to this modern form of slavery.

Hisaye Yamamoto’s “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara”: The Collective Silence of Japanese Internees and Its Literary Representations

육성희 한국현대영미소설학회 2012 현대영미소설 Vol.19 No.3

This paper pays close attention to the fact that Japanese internees had long been silent about their internment experience during and after World War II. Reviewing the few fictional narratives about the Japanese internment that were written from the time when the war ended until the 1970s, this paper approaches their silence and amnesia not simply as a heritage of Japanese culture. Rather, it reads the internees’ silence as the latency of trauma, in which dynamic processes of repression, fragmentation, omission, distortion, etc. take place. Their collective silence becomes a discursive site that discloses their untold stories and feelings that are bound with diverse losses of their ideals, wishes, and loved people, as well as with their compulsory spatial displacement and dislocation during the war. These psychological dynamics are teased out as this paper analyzes Hisaye Yamamoto’s “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara.” Even though a nisei writer who belongs to “the silent generation,” Yamamoto expresses her criticism of American racism by implanting a covert plot that contains unraveled stories and feelings of the title character under the explicit narrative of the story. The silent, implied narrative will be explored as an aesthetically invented form to reveal the psychological dynamics in the internees’ silence. In addition, reading the relations between the title character and other internees in the camp as a synecdoche, this paper will disclose how the double plot in the story metonymically portrays the relations between the Japanese internees and American society. This paper pays close attention to the fact that Japanese internees had long been silent about their internment experience during and after World War II. Reviewing the few fictional narratives about the Japanese internment that were written from the time when the war ended until the 1970s, this paper approaches their silence and amnesia not simply as a heritage of Japanese culture. Rather, it reads the internees’ silence as the latency of trauma, in which dynamic processes of repression, fragmentation, omission, distortion, etc. take place. Their collective silence becomes a discursive site that discloses their untold stories and feelings that are bound with diverse losses of their ideals, wishes, and loved people, as well as with their compulsory spatial displacement and dislocation during the war. These psychological dynamics are teased out as this paper analyzes Hisaye Yamamoto’s “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara.” Even though a nisei writer who belongs to “the silent generation,” Yamamoto expresses her criticism of American racism by implanting a covert plot that contains unraveled stories and feelings of the title character under the explicit narrative of the story. The silent, implied narrative will be explored as an aesthetically invented form to reveal the psychological dynamics in the internees’ silence. In addition, reading the relations between the title character and other internees in the camp as a synecdoche, this paper will disclose how the double plot in the story metonymically portrays the relations between the Japanese internees and American society.

The Psychical Dynamics of Melancholic Identification in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee

육성희 미국소설학회 2011 미국소설 Vol.18 No.2

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee focuses on the diverse processes of melancholic identification as the female subjects are displaced and dislocated during the Japanese occupation of Korea and through their immigration to America. This paper first explores the psychological violence of the identification processes, which impose new objects in the place of existing objects in the object relationship, and the consequent splitting of the subjects from their old love object/ideals. Cha embodies the repressive/oppressive forces of melancholic identification through the processes of linguistic, religious, and cinematic identification: these processes are respectively represented by the language acquisition in the process of colonial pedagogy and assimilation, Catholic catechism, and cinematic fascination in Dictee. Examining the way the female subjects deal with their love objects, both lost and newly imposed, in the state of melancholy, this paper illuminates how they respond to the historial and cultural demands as they cross the border between incompatible love objects/ideals such as language, culture, nation, homeland, etc. This paper further investigates the significance of the imaginary homeland to the displaced, transnational subjects in order to examine the functions of the “lost-but-not-lost” old love objects/ideals, as well as newly imposed ones, in the identity formation of the diasporic subjects.

A Journey Toward Self-Awareness and Restoration in No Telephone to Heaven

육성희 대한영어영문학회 2022 영어영문학연구 Vol.48 No.1

This paper explores Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (1987) with a focus on the protagonist Clare Savage’s migratory journey and her attempt to restore and rebuild her self and homeland. A sequel to Abeng (1984), No Telephone to Heaven portrays the racially and economically divided condition of postcolonial Jamaica and its people through the theme of self-exploration via migration and reclaiming. This paper examines how the migration of Clare, a light-skinned Creole girl, departing from and returning to Jamaica through the U.S., England, and Europe affects her self-identification. The racial discrimination Clare and her parents encounter through dislocation brings about epiphanic moments in which all three must confront their choices of identification. For Clare, her realization of her Otherness outside of Jamaica leads to new self-awareness of identity as an ongoing holistic process; this, in turn, drives her ‘spiral’ return to Jamaica and subsequent participation in a guerilla group, an act of self-identification geared toward restoring and reclaiming Jamaica and Jamaican-ness.

이분법을 넘어서 -아시아계 미국문학 국외 연구동향

육성희 ( Sung Hee Yook ) 영미문학연구회 2010 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.28