• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.55 no.2
• /
• pp.215-240
• /
• 2009

This paper focuses on how Younghill Kang internalizes whiteness ideology through interracial romance to build himself as an oriental Yankee and recover his masculinity in his autobiographical novel East Goes West. This paper also focuses on Kang's strategy of racial and cultural hybridity presented in this novel. The theoretical basis of my argument is a mixture of Fanon's psychoanalysis in his Black Skin, White Masks, Bhabha's notion of mimicry in The Location of Culture, and notions related to race and gender of some Asian critics such as Patricia Chu, Jinqi Ling, and Lisa Lowe. In East Goes West, white women appear as "ladder of success" of successful assimilation and serve as cultural mediators and instructors and sometimes adversaries who Korean male immigrants have to win to establish identities in which Americanness, ethnicity, and masculinity are integrated. However, three Korean men, Chungpa Han, To Wan Kim, George Jum, who fall in love with white women fail to win their beloveds in marriage. George Jum fails to sustain a white dancer, Jun' interest. Kim wins the affection of Helen Hancock, a New England lady, but Kim commits suicide when he knows Helen killed herself because her family doesn't approve their relationship. Han's love for Trip remains vague, but Kang implies Han will continue his quest for "the spiritual home" as the name of "Trip." In East Goes West, Kang also attempts to challenge the imagining of a pure, monolithic, and naturalized white dominant U.S. Culture by exploring the cultural and racial hybridity shown by June and the various scenes of Halem in the 1920s. June who works for a Harlem cabaret is a white woman but she wears dark makeup. Kang questions the white face of America's self-understanding and racial constitution of a unified white American culture through June's racial masquerade. Kang shows that like Asian and black Americans, the white American also has an ambivalent racial identity through June's black mimicry and there is no natural and unchanging essence behind one's gender and race identity constitution.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.8 no.11
• /
• pp.115-124
• /
• 2008

My former thesis was about the present status of Korean film aesthetics of Korean blockbusters through the cultural hybridity. Now this thesis focuses on hybridity and tragedy in Korean blockbusters from the postcolonial perspectives. Typical examples are Shiri, JSA, Taegukgi containing a special Korean situation of division ideology and expressing an extremely Western style of production. These movies hardly provide any historical causes, critical explanation, or vision beyond the discourse of national tragedy. They simply supply sentimental feeling of sympathizing with the misfortune of heroes in the course of national suffering. Therefore, these movies shows limitation not to accomplish postcolonial resistance.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.17 no.11
• /
• pp.567-576
• /
• 2017

Foods are cultural texts. Recipes, cultural peculiarities, and relationships between people. Foods can expand into narratives. This study will compare and analyze the characteristics of the Korean - Japanese visual texts, and . The aim of this study is to examine the between-space and gender, and to examine the universality and specificity of the text of Korean - Japanese image culture. If the movie reproduces the world of reality fictionally from the viewpoint of the between-space, it can be seen that the artistic has differentiation by realistically reproducing the fictional world, but universally creates the hyper reality. Second, in the dimension of gender, both images suggest universality in which the dissolution of sex role becomes paradoxical product. However, has differentiation from the fact that it presents the aspect of gender equality more specifically.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.54 no.1
• /
• pp.77-105
• /
• 2008

Even though Paule Marshall and Ishmael Reed have differences of gender, generation, and literary techniques, they share common points in dealing with cultural conflicts and racial discrimination in the United States as Afro-American Writers. As black minority writers, Marshall and Reed write out of a perspective of forced immigrant/fragmentary native consciousness. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the protagonist's reaction to racial prejudice, different cultures and their attempts to reconcile and to coexist with other races and their culture in these writers' representative works. Marshall's uniqueness as a contemporary black female artist stems from her ability to write from the three levels, that is, African American and Caribbean black. So, Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones represents an attempt to identify, analyze, and resolve the conflict between cultural loss/displacement and cultural domination/hegemony. Reed's Japanes by Spring offers a blistering attack upon the various cultural and racial factions of the academy and the bankrupt value systems in America. Reed's depiction of Jack London College's existing racial problems-later compounded by the cultural dilemmas that accompany the Japanese occupation of the institution-reveals his interest in highlighting the ways in which any monoculturalist ideology ultimately results in racist and culturally exclusive policies. Marshall's and Reed's novels provide opportunities for reader to explore various manifestations of intercultual and interethnic dynamics. They present the possibility of reconciliation and coexistence between different race and ethnic cultures through asserting a cultural hybridity and multiculturalism.

• American Studies
• /
• v.43 no.1
• /
• pp.25-56
• /
• 2020

The essay examines two contemporary American plays that portray adult Korean American adoptees' return to South Korea: How to Be a Korean Woman (2012) by Sunmee Chomet and Middle Brother (2014) by Eric Sharp. While the existing scholarship on transnational adoption has discussed homecoming as a predominantly female experience of birth mothers and daughters, Chomet and Sharp suggest the differing ways in which the adoptee subjectivity is re-imagined in particularly gendered ways after homecoming. In these plays, adult adoptees' repeated, mundane bodily performances of Korean cultural norms illustrate how notions of femininity and masculinity are inscribed onto the body of adoptee individuals under the patriarchal system. Such performative construction of Korean-ness departs from the earlier theatrical representations of young, adolescent adoptees' homecoming that served as a symbolic rite of passage, a necessary process through which they would gain cultural hybridity and mature into cosmopolitan American-ness.

• Asian review of World Histories
• /
• v.3 no.1
• /
• pp.81-112
• /
• 2015

This essay interrogates the category of the 'global' in the emerging domain of 'global intellectual history'. Through a case study of the Indian social-religious reformer Rammohun Roy (1772/4-1833), I argue that notions of global selfhood and rights-consciousness (which have been preoccupying concerns of recent debates in intellectual history) have multiple conceptual and practical points of origin. Thus in early colonial India a person like Rammohun Roy could invoke centuries-old Indic terms of globality (vishva, jagat, sarva, sarvabhuta, etc.), selfhood (atman/brahman), and notions of right (adhikara) to liberation/salvation (mukti/moksha) as well as late precolonial discourses on 'worldly' rights consciousness (to life, property, religious toleration) and models of participatory governance present in an Indo-Islamic society, and hybridize these with Western-origin notions of rights and liberties. Thereby Rammohun could challenge the racial and confessional assumptions of colonial authority and produce a more deterritorialized and non-sectarian idea of selfhood and governance. However, Rammohun's comparativist world-historical notions excluded other models of selfhood and globality, such as those produced by devotional Vaishnava, Shaiva, and Shakta-Tantric discourses under the influence of non-Brahmanical communities and women. Rammohun's puritan condemnation of non-Brahmanical sexual and gender relations created a homogenized and hierarchical model of globality, obscuring alternate subaltern-inflected notions of selfhood. Class, caste, and gender biases rendered Rammohun supportive of British colonial rule and distanced him from popular anti-colonial revolts and social mobility movements in India. This article argues that today's intellectual historians run the risk of repeating Rammohun's biases (or those of Hegel's Weltgeschichte) if they privilege the historicity and value of certain models of global selfhood and rights-consciousness (such as those derived from a constructed notion of the 'West' or from constructed notions of various 'elite' classicized 'cultures'), to the exclusion of models produced by disenfranchised actors across the world. Instead of operating through hierarchical assumptions about local/global polarity, intellectual historians should remain sensitive to and learn from the universalizable models of selfhood, rights, and justice produced by actors in different spatio-temporal locations and intersections.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
• /
• v.55 no.7 s.98
• /
• pp.156-170
• /
• 2005

As contemporary art tends to diverge from its fixed genres and intends to appeal to the public, fashion comes to contribute to the contemporary art area, by playing an important part in the creation of artistic value of art work. Nowadays, it is not unusual to see fashion work shown in an art exhibition parallel with art work, since some artists adopt costumes as the medium of their work in order to explore various means of expression. The occurrence of philosophical, sociological theories concerning human body parallelled with the prevalence of the post-structuralist ideas and occurrence of various styles of artistic expressions of body encouraged active research and attracted social attention to body. With such background, fashion art was formed by a means of the integration of body and fashion in order to create extreme artistic expression. 1 intend to investigate a variety of trends in fashion art from the viewpoint of body space. This study developed criteria for fashion image in contemporary art. Those criteria are based on the dichotomy that divides body into inner aspects and outer aspects. According to the criteria, Firstly, the extension type of body shape includes enlargement and reduction as its sub-types. Secondly, the opening-closure type includes opening type and closure type as its sub-types. Thirdly, the intensity type categorizes clothes into uniqueness and hybridity. Dynamism type classifies fashion art into fixation and moving. The various expressions of clothes type are interpreted as a means by which we can criticize many phenomena of modern society, such as loss of humanity, isolation of individuals, loss of identity, commercialism, and materialism. In the latter period of modern society, the integration of the double-faced nature of body and spirit was attempted and popular fashion was introduced into art in order to express desire, death, gender, identity, and sexual pleasure.