• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.60 no.2
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• pp.295-314
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• 2014

Flannery O'Connor's stories have garnered critical attention for her religious views. Thus, the interpretation of violence in her fiction has been mainly associated with salvation in her characters. Nonetheless, O'Connor was aware of the historical facts surrounding white supremacist activities in the American South. In its revenge narrative, O'Connor's story "The Displaced Person" (1955) unveils subtle layers of politics from the Ku Klux Klan as well as her white characters' views of race and immigrants. O'Connor used a voice of reserve due to her minority position as woman and Catholic. Although she was a white female, she lived within repressive Southern religiosity. Racism prevailed beneath Southern chauvinism and patriotism. The conflicts in the South display the violent aspects of the "Invisible White Supreme Empire." After the World Wars, devalued whiteness elicited atrocities against socially upward mobile African Americans, foreigners and Catholics. This article explores the convoluted issues of racial hierarchy, miscegenation, and xenophobic reactions in the South.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.47-70
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• 2016

Under the inhumane oppression of imperialism, the Third World's political violence has been often represented as an immediate and explosive one with an instant, concentrated visibility. Yet the ecological and psychological exploitation of the Third-World countries by empires, as Rob Nixon insists, shows the relative invisibility of slow violence. This paper is to reveal this slow violence of the marginalized areas symbolized as the lowland. Although Arne Naess' deep ecology promotes the inherent worth of living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs. this paper deals with three postcolonial ecological textbooks which criticize the white-centered deep ecology: Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland, and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Through postcolonial critical study, this paper finds out that all these three works have some themes in common. First, these postcolonial works assume a shape of family saga which is parallel to the slow violence of ecological and psychological plundering of empires in the postcolonial countries. Second, like the mangroves which have a tenacious hold on life, these postcolonial people rather overcome the heterogenic challenge with the sturdy and tough mind than defeated. Third, the native people's ethics of earth functions as the stronghold for their respectable lifestyle in their indigenous historicity. Finally, as a big fat brother, the Americanized globalization or neoliberalism is warned as the neocolonialism which is often shown as the disguised pattern of greenwashing. Namely, the people's self-enhancement is always prior to the imperialistic development or neoliberalism in the postcolonial ecological texts which sharply contrast the native's life consciousness and the empire's development theory.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.531-560
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• 2008

I hope to demonstrate in this paper the degree to which the works of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, mainly The Wise Virgins, The Village in the Jungle, and The Voyage Out, are contained within the politics of home. In doing so, I aim to challenge some mainstream criticism that affirms their resistance to British imperial desire. Although their statuses as outsiders in the British Empire, being a Jew and being a woman respectively, allowed Leonard and Virginia Woolf to criticize British imperialism and a male-dominated culture as well as racial and cultural hierarchies to a degree, their works inevitably unveil their prioritization of the British white-oriented space. In some ways their authorial positions in relation to their texts uphold the imperial center as an invisible regime of truth in their narratives, supporting the patriarchal and imperial binary oppositional structure and its hierarchical order imposed not only on the British subject but also on the foreign, colonial others. Leonard's and Virginia's inconsistencies and ambiguities betray their racial distantiation and notions of British white superiority, as disclosed in their racially stereotyped descriptions and the absence of real communication between the British characters and the colonial, foreign others. The work of self-repetition, the major mechanism in the politics of home, dies hard in Leonard's and Virginia's 'antiimperial' works. Leonard's and Virginia's struggle to stand against the imperial desire needs a genuine ethical position in order to embrace the Other, which would allow us to explore further and guard against the pitfall of postcolonial criticism's being easily degenerated into a neo-colonial criticism, another politics of home.

• (The) Research of the performance art and culture
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• no.37
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• pp.249-293
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• 2018

The Musical Theatre was a popular art genre that originated from the western musical tradition represented by the European opera. In the twentieth century, it bloomed around Broadway in the United States. It is also one of the commercial arts which is popularly loved by the public in the field of performing arts all over the world at present. Due to the nature of this genre, the development of dramas and the expression of characters use music, not words or gestures, as the main medium. And the style of music reacts sensitively to the taste of the public, not to a particular class. When Japan colonized Korea, the empire strongly believed modernization equaled westernization and Japan was the one who could awaken Korean. The Japanese colonial music education was intended to bring cooperation and obedience to Japan by forcibly injecting Japanese ideology and culture into Joseon people. The music education of colonialism with the textbook of the "Songs for public education(보통교육 창가집)" compiled by the Japanese government was a sparkstone for the conversion of the Korean musical identity to Japanese and Western music. In addition to the capitalistic economical mechanism for establishing a South Korean government friendly with the United States during the Cold War after liberation, and the rush of American Pop culture represented by 'the show stage in 8th US Arm' and 'movies' which are to be the influence of invisible 'new cultural imperialism', our traditional music was confined to the meaning of 'Korean music', meaning 'past music'. In Korea, after the liberation, the musical was introduced by the influx of American popular culture. In accordance with the cultural policy of Park Jeong-hee regime, which aimed to spread the 'healthy culture' through the modernization of traditional arts, 'The Yegreen(예그린악단)' was founded. However, the plan to create a contemporary performing art based on Korean national arts showed the possibility of success in 1966 with the success of , but soon after, they have been destined to fall into an institution that has lost their ability to operate on their own due to the suspension of the sponsorship of the regime. Due to the cultural imperialist strategy of the influence of Japanese imperialism's colonial music education and influx of American popular culture after liberation, in the early days of Korean musicals, our traditional aesthetic style brought about the situation of the 1960 's, which did not become an independent ethnic art through the exchange and expansion with Western music. This is the background of the western licensed musicals led by the Korean musical market in the 21st century as well as the main cause of musical creation based on western music.