Speculative Poetics in Cathy Park Hong`s Engine Empire = Speculative Poetics in Cathy Park Hong`s Engine Empire

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay considers Korean American poet Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire as a post-racial text in a questionably post-racial America and how that postracialism might transgress some assumptions behind the reception of Korean American texts in Korea. Building from Ramon Saldivar’s theorization of a “speculative realism” that shows a “postrace aesthetic,” the essay focuses on the first and third sections of Hong’s collection. In “Ballad of Our Jim,” the first section, Hong speculates a 19th-century American landscape that stretches from Kansas to California. In “The World Cloud,” the third section, she imagines a future California landscape and an internalized cyber-scape. Both sections show that ethnicity, which seemed to have lost visibility in illusions of a post-racial American society, remains integral to seeing and understanding the coming majority-minority American make-up. Korean and American reading contexts become interdependent in Hong’s “postrace” speculations that point toward a future that may be constantly re-imagined through various minority perspectives.