• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
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• v.143
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• pp.119-140
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• 2017

After the collapse of the Cold War, there was a shift in perception at two points in discussions on Korean unification. The real core issue of unification is first, that it is a shift in perception that the real problem of unification is not the integration of systems, but the integration of people. Second, there is a shift in perception that there are many Koreans in the four major powers related to the Korean division and their distribution is associated with the tragic history of the Korean Peninsula. The historical trauma of Korean people resulted from the oppression of the collective libido of Koreans, stemming from the pain of modern history of the Korean Peninsula. In addition, the trauma of colonization, diaspora, and division all share the structure of suppression as the '$nation{\neq}states$'. Thus, unification aims to overcome the notion that '$nation{\neq}state$' can not be separated from the process of healing the historical trauma of Koreans. First of all, this article argues that in order to achieve unification on the Korean peninsula, it requires the process of healing the traumas of colonization, diaspora, and division. Second, this paper claims that Korean unification is not only a matter of two countries, but also of making peace by healing historical trauma in Northeast Asia. Third, this paper argues that the healing of Korean's historical trauma should begin with 'sympathy' for pain and proceed to the production of a 'national commonality' through 'communication of difference', which will create a unified peninsula.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.149-167
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• 2008

Korea has persisted in the notion of "ethnic nationalism." That is "one race, one people, one language" as a homogeneous entity. This social ideal of unity prevails, even in overseas Korean communities formed by voluntary and involuntary displacement in the turmoil of modern history: communities made intermittent with the Japanese colonial occupation and with postcolonial encounters with the West. Given that the Korean people suffered from the trauma of deprivation of the language caused by the loss of the nation, nation has been equated with the language. Accordingly, "these bearers of a homeland" are also firm Korean language holders. The linguistic patriotism of unity based on the intertwining of "mother tongue" and "father country" has become prevalent in the collective memory of the people of the Korean diaspora. Korean American literature has grappled with this concept of the national history of Korea and the Korean language. The aesthetics of Korean American literature has been marked by an influx of literary resources of 'Korea' in sensibilities and structure of feelings; Korean myth, folk lore, songs, humor, traditional stories, manners, customs and historic moments. An experimental use of the Korean alphabet, Hangeul, written down as pronounced, provides an ethnic flavor in the midst of the English texts. Despite its national framework of mind, however, Korean American literature as an interstitial art reveals a keen awareness of inbetweenness, and transnational hybrid identities. By exploring the complex interrelationships of cultural and linguistic boundary-crossing practices in Korean American literature, this paper argues that the poetics of the Korean diaspora challenges the closed structure of identity formation, and offers a transnational sphere to deconstruct a rigidly demarcated national ideology of "one race, one people, one language," for the world literary history.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1035-1056
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• 2009

Korean adoptee narratives have proliferated over the last ten years as adopted Koreans have begun to represent their own experiences of violent dislocation, displacement and loss in various forms of literary and artistic works, including poems, autobiographical works, novels, documentaries and films. These narratives by Korean adoptees have intervened in the current diaspora discourse to question further the traditional categories of race, ethnicity, culture and nation by representing the unique experiences of the forced and involuntary migration of adopted Koreans. For a long time, the adoption discourse has been mostly constructed from the perspectives of adoptive parents. Therefore the voice of adoptees as well as that of the birth mothers have not been properly heard or represented in adoption discourse. According to Hosu Kim, the U. S. adoption discourse, feeling pressured to deal with the stigma of the commodification of children, changed from viewing the adoptees as children who had been rescued from poverty and abandonment to considering them as a gift from the birth mothers. With the emergence of the gift rhetoric in transnational adoption, the birth mothers erased from adoption discourse have begun to be acknowledged as one of the central characters in the adoption triad. If Korean adoptees are the "the ghostly children of Korean history," the birth mothers are their "ghostly doubles" who "bear the mark of a repressed national trauma." Somebody's Daughter represents the female experiences of becoming an adopted child and of being a birth mother. In particular, the novel makes a birth mother, the forgotten presence in adoptee narratives, into a central figure in the triangular relationship created by international adoption. The novel historicizes the experiences of a Korean adoptee growing up in America as well as those of a mother who had suffered silently from feelings of unbearable loss, guilt, grief and from unforgettable memories. In addition, narrating the birth mother's story is a way to give humanity back to these forgotten women in Korean adoption history. Revisiting the site of loss both for a mother and a daughter through the novel is an act of collective mourning. The narratives about and by Korean adoptees force Korean intellectuals to reflect seriously upon Korean society and its underlying ideology which prevents a woman from mothering her own baby, and to take an ethical and political stand on this current social and political issue.

• 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.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1013-1034
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• 2009

The space of the Other assumes the space of Barthes's multiplicity and Foucault's transdiscursive position, and, therefore, aims at becoming the locus in which the speaking subject and the hearing subjects are supposed to communicate and constitute as if they were situated in the pscychoanalytic session. However, the wall of untranslatibility across language and cultures still exist there in the space of the Other in the form of trauma and aggressivity, as Lacan demonstrate perceptively through the reading of Kant avec Sade. In short, Lacan regards the moral commandment (to love one's neighbor as oneself) as the obstacle in the Freud's myth of transgression, and interprets this in terms of the emergence of the Other. Freud understands that the aggressivity in the subject's own heart was inherent in all humans, and that one's neighbor would be evil. Lacan goes beyond Freud and articulates that the aggressivity in the imaginary relation with the Other in the mirror stage insures that an evil inheres in the very being of humanity. A global phenomenon of the diasporic identities and hybridity, the phenomenon which has been represented by the complicated intermixture of terms which span from diaspora, postcolonialism, postnationalism. and transnationalism can be clarified, if they are put in the context of the ethics of Othering or becoming the Other. The ethics of Othering presupposes the situation in which the diasporic subjects encounter the lack of the cross-cultural negotiation and communication. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the poetics of Other and the logic of the ethics of Othering can explain the postmodern or transmodern world which has become deterritorialized, diasporic, and transnational as well as how one can encounter the results of diasporic and postcolonial double consciousness, a consciousness which is a discursive category for multicultural or cross-cultural, focusing on the concept of liminality/interstitiality

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.14
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• pp.125-158
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• 2012

After liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, there was the three-year period of United States Army Military Government in Korea. In 1948, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and Republic of Korea were established in the north and south of the Korean Peninsula. The Republic of Korea is now a modern state set in the southern part of the Korean. We usually refer to Koreans as people who belong to the Republic of Korea. Can we say that is true exactly? Why make of this an obsolete question? The period from 1945 when Korea was emancipated from Japanese colonial rule to 1948 when the Republic of Korea was established has not been a focus of modern Korean history. This three years remains empty in Korean history and makes the concept of 'Korean' we usually consider ambiguous, and prompts careful attention to the silence of 'some Koreans' forced to live against their will in the blurred boundaries between nation and people. This dissertation regards 'Koreans' who came to live in the border of nations, especially 'Korean-Japanese third generation women artists'who are marginalized both Japan and Korea. It questions the category of 'Korean women's art' that has so far been considered, based on the concept of territory, and presents a new perspective for viewing 'Korean women's art'. Almost no study on Korean-Japanese women's art has been conducted, based on research on Korean diaspora, and no systematic historical records exist. Even data-collection is limited due to the political situation of South and North in confrontation. Representation of the Mother Country on the Artworks by First and Second-Generation Korean-Japanese(Zainich) Women Artists after Liberation since 1945 was published in 2011 is the only dissertation in which Korean-Japanese women artists, and early artistic activities. That research is based on press releases and interviews obtained through Japan. This thesis concentrates on the world of Korean-Japanese third generation women artists such as Kim Jung-sook, Kim Ae-soon, and Han Sung-nam, permanent residents in Japan who still have Korean nationality. The three Korean-Japanese third generation women artists whose art world is reviewed in this thesis would like to reveal their voices as minorities in Japan and Korea, resisting power and the universal concepts of nation, people and identity. Questioning the general notions of 'Korean women' and 'Korean women's art'considered within the Korean Peninsula, they explore their identity as Korean women outside the Korean territory from a post-territorial perspective and have a new understanding of the minority's diversity and difference through their eyes as marginal women living outside the mainstream of Korean and Japanese society. This is associated with recent post-colonial critical viewpoints reconsidering myths of universalism and transcendental aesthetic measures. In the 1980s and 1990s art museums and galleries in New York tried a critical shift in aesthetic discourse on contemporary art history, analyzed how power relationships among such elements as gender, sexuality, race, nationalism. Ghost of Ethnicity: Rethinking Art Discourses of the 1940s and 1980s by Lisa Bloom is an obvious presentation about the post-colonial discourse. Lisa Bloom rethinks the diversity of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender each artist and critic has, she began a new discussion on artists who were anti-establishment artists alienated by mainstream society. As migration rapidly increased through globalism lead by the United States the aspects of diaspora experience emerges as critical issues in interpreting contemporary culture. As a new concept of art with hybrid cultural backgrounds exists, each artist's cultural identity and specificity should be viewed and interpreted in a sociopolitical context. A criticism started considering the distinct characteristics of each individual's historical experience and cultural identity, and paying attention to experience of the third world artist, especially women artists, confronting the power of modernist discourses from a perspective of the white male subject. Considering recent international contemporary art, the Korean-Japanese third generation women artists who clarify their cultural identity as minority living in the border between Korea and Japan may present a new direction for contemporary Korean art. Their art world derives from their diaspora experience on colonial trauma historically. Their works made us to see that it is also associated with postcolonial critical perspective in the recent contemporary art stream. And it reminds us of rethinking the diversity of the minority living outside mainstream society. Thus, this should be considered as one of the features in the context of Korean women's art.