• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.163-183
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• 2012

This paper is one of those attempts to explore some possibility of agreement between feminist discourse and postcolonial discourses through the approach of postcolonial feminism in the reading of the controversial novel, So Far from the Bamboo Grove and Year of Impossible Goodbyes. So Far from the Bamboo Grove, when read from the perspective of postcolonial feminism, reveals 'domestic nationalism' of imperial narratives in which the violence of imperial history in Korea is hidden behind the picture of every day lives of an ordinary Japanese family and Japanese women. Furthermore, postcolonial feminist's perspective interprets Yoko family's nostalgia for their 'home,' Nanam in Korea, as 'imperialist nostalgia' working as a mask to hide the violent history of colonization of Empire. In this way, postcolonial feminist reading of the story detects the ways the narrative of Empire appropriates women, family image and even nostalgia for childhood. At the same time, this perspective explains the readers' empathy for Yoko family's suffering and the concerning women issues caused by wartime rape and sexual violence by defining Yoko as a woman of Japanese Empire, whose life of interstice between imperial men and colonial men cannot be free from violence of rape during anti colonial wars. Year of Impossible Goodbyes as a counter discourse does not overcome the traditional binary opposition of nationalism which quietens gender and class issues. As an attempt to fill in the interstice between the two perspectives of feminism and postcolonialism. postcolonial feminist reading turns out to be a valid tool for the reading of the two novels chosen here.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.43
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• pp.115-138
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• 2016

The Milk of Sorrow (La teta asustada) (2009) is a Peruvian-Spanish film by a young, female Peruvian director, Claudia Llosa (1976 - ). By applying the theories that feminist and subaltern scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak presents in "Feminism and Critical Theory", the present work questions the ironic term, "Feminism in the Third World" by considering the Latin American context. Would the term refer to the feminism of Native Indian women or white creole women? The present work raises this question via Llosa's The Milk of Sorrow, in which a white creole woman, Aída, takes advantage of a quechua woman, Fausta. Through analysis of this film, this work demonstrates that in the Latin American context, even in a single country, there should be various types of feminism, since what Native Indian women fight against is different from what white creole women fight against. Thus, it insists that feminism in the Third World should develop in a deconstructionist manner, in which each woman has the ability to interpret her own social and political stance. Furthermore, it can be said that cultural appropriation is taking place in the "real" world as well as on the screen: a white creole director, Llosa, is taking advantage of a hot-button issue in our postmodern era, the violation of the human rights of minorities, especially those of Latin American Native Indian women, since Llosa became a success and won many prizes in international film festivals for her work.