• Title/Summary/Keyword: Chang-rae Lee

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Chang-rae Lee and Diasporic Romance (이창래의 디아스포라 로맨스)

  • Kim, Jungha
    • American Studies
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    • v.42 no.1
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    • pp.1-22
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    • 2019

  • This paper suggests a genealogy of romance in Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and The Surrendered. A flexible textual performance and literary strategy spanning issues of beauty and love, romance in Lee registers the writer's distinctive diasporic negotiation with sites of departure and arrival, in particular with traumatic histories of the m/other country. Native Speaker resolves the crisis of public immigrant love within the compromise in the domestic melodrama. As Lee turns to the scenes of historical trauma in the twentieth century transpacific, romance becomes a key strategy through which his aestheticized framing and deframing of comfort woman is performed and the Korean War finds odd comfort in the aesthetic energy of perverse care in Italy. Through the dehistoricizing movement outside of the historical into the realm of myth and nostalgia, Lee's diasporic romance breaks away from mandates of representation and works within the excess of mistranslation.

The Process of Racialization in the Hybrid Age-focusing on Chang Rae Lee's Aloft (혼종화 시대의 인종화 프로세스-이창래의 『비상』을 중심으로)

  • Lee, Seonju
    • English & American cultural studies
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    • v.14 no.1
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    • pp.141-167
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    • 2014

  • The macro structural perspective of how race was formed nationally, politically, and socially has greatly contributed in revealing the ills of racialism until now, likewise, the dichotomous form of Asian-American literature corresponding to such perspective has made great contribution in awakening people's awareness of race. While acknowledging the contribution of such macro perspectives, we must take note that today's racialism is becoming materialized in different aspects. The tendency of present racial formation is that the recognition of race is spread out lightly but widely in everyday lives and is revealed through the perception of our body. While publicly stating that society is color-blind and inequality significantly resolved, racialism emerges in the personal and everyday aspects. Not erased but diluted and spread out more widely, and the more diluted, harder to erase, racialism has penetrated into the perception of our lives. Racialism works not as a conspicuous discrimination but as a common sense that is 'naturally' absorbed into our perception and perspective. Chang Rae Lee's Aloft shows the process of such racial formation in our age of hybridization. This study tries to clarify why present racial formation must be analyzed in the macro perceptual perspective and show how the racial perception in the narrative of the white dominant narrator, Jerry, becomes the field where he lives and how it is spread through his perception. Through the theories of Judith Butler and Linda M. Alcoff, this study analyzes how people are got to self-identification with the racialization through reiteration and what the relationship is between racial formation and the subject's performativity in Aloft. The study concludes that revealing such current processes of racial formation perceptively is not thinking it 'natural' and inevitable but the process of bringing about a change in it.