• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1123-1137
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• 2009

Revisiting the horror of slave mutiny in nineteenth century America via Julia Kristeva's concept of abject, this essay examines abject fear in Amasa Delano and Babo's subversive act to deceive Delano in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno." Babo, the slave, exercises subversive power, thereby reversing racial hierarchy aboard the slave ship-the San Dominick. Babo's ability to mimic and control racial stereotypes exposes how nineteenth-century racial hierarchy was only a social fiction, which becomes the very source of Delano's fear. Delano's dread belies upon the possible disruption of social order triggered by Babo'sblack rebellion. In order to repress his fear, Delano consciously and unconsciously attempts to re-inscribe white dominion and reaffirm black inferiority and stereotypes by means of rationalizing the disturbing signs he witnesses on the San Dominick. When Delano discovers the realsituation of the ship, he must relinquish the abject resonance that disturbs the previous racial order. Employing a legal document, Delano re-inscribes the official position of the blacks as slaves, defining them as violent savages, and thereby silences Babo. However, Melville's text is not a testament to white power. "Benito Cereno" actually endorses abject instability to challenge racial hierarchies through the poignant image of Babo's dead gaze in the last scene of the novella. Thus, "Benito Cereno" exemplifies the recurring power of abject as a threat to social hierarchy and as a constant reminder of the falsity and insecurity of a social order.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.232-243
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• 2023

The boundaries between fashion and contemporary art are increasingly blurred showing their interchangeability. This study examines Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou's concept of dispossession to analyze expressions of gender, racial, and class identity in Martine Gutierrez's representative work, Indigenous Woman. First, gender expressions in Indigenous Woman emphasize the possibility of performative and practical gender as an image that rejects norms that grant authority according to the possession of innate body parts. Second, racial identity is expressed through resistance to the ideology of whiteness and imperialism reinforced by fashion media. The author aims to overcome normative stereotypes through the media she creates, which reveals her identity as a person of color. Third, class identity is represented through stereotypes that limit the lives of indigenous people to primitive and natural things. The author reveals a critical awareness of the hierarchical structure and cultural appropriation these stereotypes have created. This study analyzed contemporary artworks using fashion media through the concept of dispossession. The significance of this study lies in raising a critical awareness of the practices that diffuse minority identities in fashion media.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.32
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• pp.335-361
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• 2013

This study examines the ethnoscape of TV dramas on three Korean nationwide television channels from 2005 to 2012 by breaking down how many non-Koreans appear and how they are represented. Among all TV dramas, 6.4% show non-Korean characters of which are generally supportive or small roles. These characters are categorized into four groups: adoration, sympathy, proximity, and other. The adoration group consists mostly of white males from USA or Europe that have professional careers such as medical doctors or lawyers and are positively represented with attractive appearance and nice character. On the other hand, the sympathy group is made up of Southeast, Central Asians and blacks. They are mainly represented as an underprivileged group: females and low-paid workers. In the proximity group are the Japanese and Chinese characters. The Japanese are often represented as rich people that are highly competent or are able to easily cooperate with Koreans. This result shows that Korean TV dramas provide racial and ethnic stereotypes. Though rarely, some dramas represent various lives of foreigners and racial others in Korea. This study contributes to the establishment of sound multiculturalism by analyzing representation of racial others in TV dramas and internalized stereotypes of foreigners in the diverse and multicultural Korean society.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.693-718
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• 2009

Kate Burns, a disillusioned Irish woman in Quetzalcoatl, has alternating feelings of fear, repulsion, oppression, compassion, and fascination vis-à-vis Mexican people. Together, these feelings are constitutive of a psychic process in which an imaginary appropriation of the other takes place. In this process white subjectivity represents or reconstructs the dark race precisely as its other. At the same time, Kate's feelings register her anxious recognition of the resistant, unappropriated being of the dark people: their true 'otherness,' or what Žižek calls "the excess of existence over representation." The otherness, frequently racial and sexual, evokes mixed feelings in the white subject. Kate's at once amorous and aggressive response to Ramón's body provides a case in point. Kate's emotional undulation is considerably mitigated in The Plumed Serpent, the revised version of the novel in which the theme of 'blood-mixing' is pushed to the ultimate point. Yet the interracial marriage resolves neither the racial nor the ontologico-sexual issues raised in the first version. Kate is still attracted to Ramón in his sagacious sensuality but goes on to get married to Cipriano, a pure Indian, only to find his mechanical masculinity ever unpalatable. This shows, not just Lawrence's wilful commitment to the 'blood-mixing' theme, but perhaps his lingering taboo against miscegenation as well. Changes in the plot entail those in the narrative voice. In Quetzalcoatl, Owen, a spectatorial and gossipy character, frequently competes for narration with the fully participant third-person narrator. In The Plumed Serpent, the third-person narrator becomes predominant, now attempting with greater confidence to present the reality of the racial other immediately to European readership. While such immediacy is illusional, narrative insistence on it implies a struggle to displace racial stereotypes and offer an experiential understanding of the other.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.99-125
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• 2010

This paper explores the political significance of a literary work, the hidden side beneath the ideology of founding America in Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok which reconstructs the history of the colonial period. The ideological strategy of founding America on racial discrimination is given a repeated representation in 19th-century American novels. Most works shed a negative light on Native Americans, whereas Hobomok stands out by presenting a positive picture of a miscegenation between a Native American man and a white woman, the acculturation of a half Indian into the white society. Furthermore, Child undoes distorted stereotypes about native Americans, exposing the Puritans' intolerant and exclusive attitudes and criticizing men who forced women to be obedient for the cause of nation and religion. However, Child also shows that she could not be free from the ideology of founding America which insisted on the superiority of the white's racial identity and excluded the Native Americans as beings who were destined to vanish gradually but eventually. Although Hobomok revises stereotypical representation of Native Americans as the other, it also serves for a political purpose, showing a politically inseparable relationship between literary works and the ideology of founding America.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.19-27
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• 2023

This paper is aimed at exploring a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural trianglulation of Black, White, and Korean American race relations connected to a large-scale disturbance in the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The second generation Korean American Steph Cha's Your House Will Pay (2019) focuses on a social portrait of the racially marginalized beings as Korean immigrant merchants and African American native consumers. This family saga explores issues resulting from racial hierarchy, racialized stereotypes, and historical marginalization in the internalized sociometry of race and class inequality. This work grapples with issues involved in a sociocultural web of racial triangulation under the white dominant structure, and ensuing intergroup conflicts of social minorities in the economic geography of urban space. It opens up civil discussions for transracial, transethnic, and transcultural interactions and coexistence. It ultimately leads to extending young people's minds for a deep understanding of the socioecomonic landscape of racial matrix, and enhancing the cultural literacy for a better awareness of social empathy and the communal respect of life.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.35
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• pp.97-122
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• 2014

Since the arrival of Chinese immigrants in the 1850s, many Euro-American writers tended to project their fears, contempt, desires and fantasy onto the Other race and perceived Chinese Americans in stereotypes-dangerous villains, unassimilated aliens, quiet and passive servants, sexually submissive women, or seductive prostitutes. However in the 1970s and the 1980s Euro-American novels expressed varying attitudes towards Chinese Americans. Many earlier EuroAmerican writers began portraying positive characterizations of Chinese Americans. The purpose of this study is to examine the ways one of the Euro-American writers, Howard Fast characterized Chinese Americans in The Immigrants. Part of the novel concerns a Chinese American family. Fast gave a favorable portrayal of Chinese Americans. Unlike many Euro-American novelists who dealt only with Chinese American villains and prostitutes and view Chinese Americans as the lowest class of American society, Fast, on the other hand, portrayed Chinese Americans as law-abiding and useful citizens. Thus, I will discuss how Howard Fast subverted the familiar negative characterization of Chinese Americans and placed Chinese American experiences in the context of American immigration history. Many white Americans tended to notice only the lurid and sensational aspects in the Chinese American community. They seldom regarded Chinese Americans as people with homes and families and seldom saw Chinese Americans as individuals, as human beings with feelings, pain, and joy. To counter this racist view, Fast described the family life of Chinese Americans and depicted Chinese Americans as individuals with a full range of human emotions and with strong family and cultural ties. Though Fast debunked some myths about Chinese Americans, he also reinforces other stereotypes or some stereotypical illusions about them. In conclusion, I'll demonstrate Fast's work remains an incomplete representation of Chinese Americans.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.1023-1039
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• 2012

The rising urban space in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century was an exemplary site of struggles between the dominant white population and those who migrated from the imperial peripheries. By setting up the space of Chinatown as a segregated sphere within the urban space, the dominant white American society attempted to recreate the sense of distance between themselves and the racial "others." Accordingly, the dominant narrative representations of San Francisco Chinatown at the turn of the century endeavored to produce and maintain the spatial dichotomies between the orderly spaces of natives and the disruptive immigrant communities within the larger boundary of modern American city space. As a Eurasian woman writer, Sui Sin Far attempted to provide distinctive portrayals of the space of Chinatown and its inhabitants that were far different from those of her contemporaries. Through her portrayals of San Francisco Chinatown in her collection of short-stories, Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings (1912), Far challenges against the false stereotypes and misreading of this unique immigrant space within and efforts to present the Chinatown as a heterotopic diaspora space where the "insiders" and the "outsiders" of the American urban space intermingle and influence each other.

• Korean Journal of Culture and Social Issue
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.39-69
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• 2008

The present study examined the overall receptivity of community members to migrant wives in Korea. A total of 23 community members from two regions, Ansan, an urban area and Youngam, a rural area, were selected for the interview based on their prior experience with migrant wives. Data were collected via a semi-structured interview method. The participants provided their personal feelings and thoughts on a variety of issues involving migrant wives, such as how they perceive migrant wives' original culture and lifestyles, the nature of their interaction experience with migrant wives, their overall evaluation of migrant wives, their opinions about migrant wives' cultural adaptation, and their opinions about the on-going transformation of the Korean society into a multi-racial, multi-cultural society. Interview results indicated that, although the participants' attitude toward migrant wives was positive, the overall receptivity to migrant wives was largely based on the traditional sex-role stereotypes typically found in the Korean society. Moreover, the vast majority of the participants endorsed a narrow-minded, uni-directional perspective on cultural adaptation which puts far greater emphasis on migrant wives' assimilation into the host culture than reciprocal influence process between the two cultures. Implications of the study and directions for future research were discussed.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.53-92
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• 2018

This essay aims to examine chick lit written within the Asian American context. For the most part, the chick lit genre has been typically regarded as a site to study contemporary white women's experiences and to debate the genres' credentials as feminist literature. Though some may disagree, there is general consensus that chick lit has fallen out of vogue after reaching its peak in the first decade of the new millenium.; nevertheless, it is being revisited by readers and critics alike as it has recently re-emerged as a location upon which to examine how race and gender inform notions of national belonging and female subject formation in the twenty-first century. To this end, this essay reads Kim Wong Keltner's The Dim Sum of All Things (2004). Keltner's protagonist Lindsey Owyang is yet another twentysomething "chick" looking for love, self, independence, and success in the huge megalopolis of San Francisco. What sets Lindsey apart from the chick prototype is that she is a third-generation ABC (American-born Chinese) and issues relevant to Asian America frequently make their way into Lindsey's narrative. Though it is generally considered as standing a "few notches above the standard chick-lit fare" (Stover n. pag), I would argue that meaningful reflections on many of the major pillars of Asian American literature, history, and cultural politics are glossed over in favor of cursory musings about the daily vicissitudes of Lindsey's life. This essay thus takes to task Ferriss's claim that a "serious" consideration of chick lit "brings into focus many of the issues facing contemporary women and contemporary culture - issues of identity, of race and class, of femininity and feminism, of consumerism and self-image" (2). I contend that a close examination of Keltner's The Dim Sum of All Things discloses that the chick lit format undermines a "serious consideration" of Asian American issues by presenting in particular a highly problematic representation of race and of Asian American femininity.