• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.25
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• pp.213-236
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• 2011

The negative symbol of 'American imperialism', which was reinterpreted superimposed on the symbol imposed on Japanese imperialism in the 1945 Liberation of Korea, was more amplified added by the experiences of the bombing and massacre by US troops during the Korean War. In other words, the symbol of the extreme 'American imperialism' in the liberation in which even the role of America contributing to the liberation of Josun had been denied had continued for a long time adhered to and amplified through the war. Thus, unlike the current emphasis laid by North Josun, the assertion in the form of 'American imperialism=Korean wolf' is an idea made from the mixture of fact and fiction combined with the theory of imperialism rediscovered in the liberation and the experience of massacre during the Korean War. And this superimposed symbol for American imperialism naturally causes the problem of being superimposed also on the symbol of North Josun. And the extreme formalization for 'good' and 'bad' sides was based on the dichotomous compositions of beauty and ugliness, good and evil. The ground for saying that an act by a good side is 'unconditionally' legitimate is nowhere found. The anti-American viewpoint rediscovered in such an extreme form results in one aspect of criticism and resemblance as a result of being locked up in the same violence which one has rejected by oneself. The anti-American viewpoint going on in the form of anti-imperialist nationalism leaves nothing except another terrible retaliation for terrible brutality. It is self-evident that one can never get out of the enchanting power of imperialism which North Josun has continuously criticized in a ring of violence and vengeance, the familiar grammar commanded by North Josun literature.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.3
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• pp.391-411
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• 2011

This paper examines Du Boisian critique of American exceptionalism through a close textual analysis of his writings from early essays to later works. As an attempt to respond to the persistent grip American exceptionalism has on both the academia and the intellectual world at large, this paper tries to fill in the gaps within the discourse of American exceptionalism by exploring the works of one of the most towering American intellectual figures, and suggests that the discourse of American exceptionalism has remained within the purview of white scholars. Although at times inconsistent and contradictory, Du Bois's trenchant critique of American civilization and Western imperialism deconstructs the original ideals of America, creating more than a fissure in the ideology/hegemony/state fantasy of American exceptionalism. I argue that Du Boisian critique of American exceptionalism shows its violent marginalization and racialization based on white supremacy. Du Boisian critique should be a cautionary tale for those scholars who talk of "reform" or "replenishment" or even who occlude the possibility that American exceptionalism has not always functioned as a "state fantasy" by assuming its absolute blinding powers.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.107-127
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• 2008

Critics are inclined to interpret J.M. Coetzee's novels in South African contexts, which Coetzee's own background seems to support. One has to bear in mind, however, that Coetzee tends to "see the South African situation as only one manifestation of a wider historical situation to do with colonialism, late colonialism, neo-colonialism." In other words, putting too much emphasis on South African contexts may diminish or undermine significance of Coetzee's multi-layered novels. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to highlight what Coetzee has to say about American colonialism/imperialism and to emphasize importance of "postcolonial rhetoric of simultaneity" which is repeatedly shown in his fictional works. It gives a meticulous attention to and analyzes "Vietnam Project," the first novella of Dusklands, Coetzee's very first novel, which depicts and characterizes "what Chomsky in the context of Vietnam [War] called 'the backroom boys.'" "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," "When a Woman Grows Older," and Diary of a Bad Year are occasionally brought into discussion as well. This kind of study seems timely and pertinent especially when we take into account the rampant American imperialism which has devastated and almost traumatized the world.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.903-941
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• 2012

This essay examines Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism focusing on the concepts of 'culture,' 'empire,' and 'nation'. The approach is critical, theoretical, and historical rather than explicatory. Consequently, the range of the essay is not limited to Said's own explanation and argument about Western imperialism and its culture presented in the book. In doing this, this essay finally purposes to be a discursive resistance to the current global empire, the United States, via a critical reading of Said's work. Said's notion of culture is set upon to disclose the function of culture as an apparatus of ideological consent of the dominated to the dominant. When applied to imperial practice, Western culture functions to subject the colonized to the colonizer. Said's geographical approach to imperialism complements the historical understanding of imperialism. Imperialism is not only the practice of Western-centered historicism but also the spatially mutual interaction between the West and the rest of the world. Along with European imperialism, Said poses the current global empire of the United States as his main target of criticism. Said's problem is that he takes the United States as a nation-state. When examined, the United States is not a nation-state, but today's empire. The empire in the appearance of the nation-state United States does not work for the interest of the American nation, that is, the American people. The empire is the transnational and postnational political and economic institution that works for the interest of global capital. In order to resist the current global empire, this essay suggests that the building or restoration of nation-states with its basic principle of people's sovereignty is in need.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.287-309
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• 2014

The purpose of this paper is to critique British imperialism in Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India (1991) by analyzing the partition of India from the perspective of nation, religion, and women. Dubbed "Punjabi-Parsi-Indian-Pakistani," Sidhwa is in a position where she can view the partition from an objective and neutralized stance. Rather than focusing on the lives of nationally well-known political figures such as Gandhi, Nehru, or Jinnah, Sidhwa delves deep into the miserable lives of the lower classes before and after the partition. First, I analyze the process of the partition, as it is performed through the manipulation of British imperialism. By adopting the viewpoint of an 8-year-old Lenny, who is the daughter of a Parsi family, Sidhwa is able to critique both British imperialism as well as the male-dominated Indian society where the treatment of women is unthinkably harsh. Second, I focus on the tragedy of the confrontation of three religions, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh. Religious people fight each other while they were forced to move from South to North or from North to South. I argue that the religious conflicts have much to do with political issues. Third, I want to argue that women are the major victims of the partition. Ayah, Hamida, and Papoo are victims of male-dominated India during the partition. They symbolize the feminized India, which is exploited and victimized by British Imperialism. Even though Ayah is shattered by Ice-candy-man while working as a prostitute and dancer, she decides to return to her home in India, which shows her challenge against male-dominated India as well as against British colonialism. In conclusion, Sidhwa tries to heal the suffering of the Indian women who fell victim to male-dominated Indian society by criticizing the problems of British imperialism. In addition, by dealing with the lives of silenced people, Sidhwa asks readers not to forget the historical tragedy and not to repeat the tragedy again.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.61-82
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• 2009

This paper aims to reexamine the issue of racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, especially in the light of Chinua Achebe's critique of the novella as a racist text entrenched with European prejudices of Africa and its people in his 1975 speech at the University of Massachusetts titled "An Image of Africa." While the novella's indictment of imperial exploitation has been noted from an early stage of its critical reception, its racism had hardly been discussed until Chinua Achebe posed it. Achebe offers the canonized status of the text as a modernist classic, "the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses," as one reason for its obvious manifestations of racism being glossed over. One may add that Conrad's militant denunciation of imperialist enterprises as "a sordid farce," his seemingly radical stance against imperialism, serves as ideological constraints upon his readers, blinding them to its immanent racism. A closer look at the novella's attack on imperialism turns out to be contradictory, for it also shows such liberal-humanist ideas as the civilizing mission, the work ethic, and the superiority of civilized man, all of which served to prop up European imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century. This ideological contradiction also accounts for Conrad's racist attitude, which is betrayed in his portrayal of Africans as obscure, primitive. Euro-American imperialism has frequently justified itself by recourse to racism, but racism has not always been allied with imperialism. Some staunch racists such as Robert Knox and Arthur de Gobineau went against imperialism, and Conrad proves one of such cases whose critique of imperialism is voiced in ways that can be characterized as racist.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.25
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• pp.55-85
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• 2011

Many States such as Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, California, New Mexico, Florida were obtained either from Spanish Empire or from Mexico. In 1848 due to the Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty America could obtain half of the original territory of Mexico. American identity cannot be understood without the history of American expansionism further consolidated by the Spanish-American War in 1898, which brought other ex-Spanish colonies such as Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines to the US. The US's interest in these territories dates back to the Monroe doctrine in 1823 when Monroe "declared the Americas off-limits to any new European colonization." America justifies their expansion based on the notion of Manifest Destiny which was created by O'Sullivan at the hight of American fever to annex Texas to US. The intent of this paper is to study how Anglo-Saxon and Latin Culture clashed against each other especially right before and after the Spanish-American War. In this study the American hero, Theodore Roosevelt and Latin American hero, $Jos{\acute{e}}$ Martí will be compared, though they did not meet each other during the Spanish-American war due to Marti's early death in 1895 at the battle for the Cuba Libre. Their comparison is significant in that the former represents the American expansionist spirit and the latter the spirit of Anti-imperialism and Anti-Anglocentrism. Along with the concept of Manifest Destiny of America, 'American exceptionalism' is also mentioned which motivates U.S. to expand further even after the Spanish-American war in the form of 'informal imperialism' characterized by 'gunboat politics'of the US. These discussions will draw attention to how recent theorists such as Bryce Traister criticizes the Border Theory represented by $Jos{\acute{e}}$ David Saldívar. Here the Border Theory is criticized to repeat the discourse of the globalized capitalism which prefers the weak state and the transnational aspects by focusing on the in-betweenness of the border. In the end the paper will focus on how the Border theory as represented by Saldivar is political enough and sets up a resistant example against American expansionism of today in its focus on the call for pan-American and pluri-versal subjectivity of the borderlands. This point will be supported by a discussion of how Saldivar's view is confirmed by Walter Mignolo who advocates the "bottom up" resistance of the indigenous people of Chiapas and other social forums such as World Social Forum and the Social Forum of the Americas derived from the Zapatistas' movement whose motto is "A World in which many world co-exist."

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.239-272
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• 2009

Our investigation of the intricate relationship among nationalism, humanism, and imperialism begins from reading Song of Ariran, the auto/biography of Kim San recorded by Nym Wales, together with Margaret Drabble's fictional adaptation of Lady Hong's autobiography, The Memoirs of Lady $Hyegy{\breve{o}}ng$, in her novel The Red Queen, in which the story of Barbara Halliwell, a modern female envoy of Lady Hong, is interweaved with Lady Hong's narrative. In spite of their being seemingly disparate texts, Song of Ariran and The Red Queen are comparable: they are written by Western female writers who deal with Koreans, along with the Korean history and culture. Accordingly, both works cut across the boundary of fiction and fact, imagination and history, and the East and the West. In the age of globalization, Western women writing (about) Korea and Koreans traversing the historical and cultural limits inevitably engage us in post-colonial discussions. Despite the temporal differences--If Song of Ariran handles with the historical turmoils of the 1930s Asia, mostly surrounding Kim San's activities as a nationalist, The Red Queen is written by a twenty-first century British woman writer whose international interest grapples with the eighteenth-century Korean Crown Princess' spirit in order to reinscribe a story of Korean woman's within the contemporary culture--, both works appeal to the humanistic perspective, advocating the universal human beings' values transcending the historical and national limitations. While this sort of humanistic approach can provide sympathy transcending time and space, this 'idealistic' process can be problematic because the Western writers's appropriation of Korean culture and its history can easily reduce its particularities to comprehensive generalization, without giving proper names to the Korean history and culture. Nonetheless, the Western female writers' attempt to find a place of 'contact' is valuable since it opens a possibility of having meaningful communications between minor culture and dominating culture. Yet, these female writers do not seem to absolutely cross the border of race, gender, and culture, which leaves us to realize how difficult it is to reach a genuine understanding with what is different from mine even in these 'universal' narratives.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.187-217
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• 2010

By reading the main character, Rene Gallimard, in M. Butterfly as a spatial metaphor of America, this article examines how homogeneous American national identity of heterosexuality and white masculinity has been reinforced since the cold war and has constituted a crisis of hegemony with the decline of imperialism and how its pathological symptom is shown through the melancholic suicide of Gallimard. This article also argues how the feminine attributes implied in race, gender and sexuality in M. Butterfly are designated and allegorized as an impure, contaminated and ahistorical marker of national integrity in pthe social and material status of the heterosexual American white male. To develop my argument, I read M. Butterfly from a psychoanalytic point of view. Therefore I depend on Freud, Lacan, and Bhabha's psychoanalysis as the theoretical basis. In this paper, I also argue that the homogenized and fixed national identity is splitted and collapsed from within as shown in the Gallimard's melancholy and in the process of splitting the "Third Space" of hybrid subjects for the marginal and the emergent like Song Liling, a homosexual Asian man, can be built "from a space in-between." Therefore Hwang calls into questions conventions of fixed, essentialist identities through the shifting gender identities between Song and Gallimard in M. Butterfly and how identities in the plural are constructed variously in throughly historicized, politicized situations, and these constructions can be complicated by relations of power.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.45
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• pp.151-186
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• 2009

This article focuses on analysing and interpreting cultural imperialism issues that have long been debated. One of issues among them is related to the characteristics of international cultural fluid. What had been debated is that cultural imperialism has been ended or not and the debates were connected to the so called 'reverse cultural imperialism'. The other issue is about this fluid is the continuation of globalization or a part of localization and this is related to the phenomena of cultural homogenization or hybrid. General trend was that simplistic cultural imperialism which had been occurred during the 1970s and 1980s was no longer effective but global dominance by transnational global media is still strong and worldwide. Therefore my research interest is centered on how they look international cultural exchanges with regard to cultural imperialism. And is the framework of cultural imperialism thesis still effective tool in researching and analysing international cultural flows? How do we look globalization relating to international exchanges? Is globalization an another aspect of imperialism? In conclusion, international cultural fluid is not so simple. Like natural phenomena or human progress, a phenomenon is not consisted of a single factor or relation. Cultural fluid is a complex one mixed with various phenomena and relations. This is related to internal and external contradictions, internal and external dynamics of a society and nation, and social and cultural life of human beings. Recent research results show that globalization and localization are closely related to many country's programming schedule, and particular cultural interpretation of specific programmes and culture are adopted to the country's culture and patterns. Cultural fluid has both-sides. One the hand it has useful and positive sides and on the other hand it has harmful and negative aspects. Imperialistic factor, globalization, cultural homogenization or hybrid are all operated and functioned together in cultual fluid. It is difficult to say that cultural imperialism thesis has been ended because American and global media's dominance is still effective. What needed at this time for us is a complex and dynamic analysis of international cultural fluid instead of simplistic cultural imperialism.