Recognizing Korean American Poets: Cathy Park Hong, Suji Kwock Kim, and Ethnic Nationalism = Recognizing Korean American Poets: Cathy Park Hong, Suji Kwock Kim, and Ethnic Nationalism

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay considers the South Korean academic reception of two Korean American poets, Suji Kwock Kim and Cathy Park Hong. Even though Hong is the much more accomplished poet in terms of her production, Kim has received much more attention in the Korean academy. The shared tenor of the attention to Kim shows what Shu-mei Shih calls “technologies of recognition,” those reading practices that make some works visible and others invisible as worthy objects of study. The Korean scholarly attention to Kim all shares versions of nationalist reading strategies, and Kim is usually assimilated into the Korean nation by Korean critics. Hong resists such assimilationist reading practices, asserting her difference from the Korean nation and collective. That assertion of difference, which might create the “ugly feeling” of “irritation” identified by Sianne Ngai, might also make her invisible to nationalist “technologies of recognition.” That assertion also shows the way to reading her as a representation of an increasingly multicultural Korea, however, since recent shifts in immigration law now include overseas Koreans even more emphatically in the Korean nation. As such a representation, Hong`s work should be included in Korean scholarship because it helps readers to think through recent challenges to Korean homogeneity by globalization.