• Title/Summary/Keyword: diasporic subject

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The Ethics of the Othering in the Era of Transnationalism

  • Kim, Youngmin
    • 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

A Symptomatic Reading of 'Discrimination' and 'Difference' in A Gesture Life (『제스처 라이프』에 나타난 '차별'과 '차이'의 징후적 읽기)

  • Rhee, Suk Koo
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.56 no.5
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    • pp.907-930
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    • 2010
  • Most previous studies on A Gesture Life focused on illuminating the role and significance of Kkutaeh, the Korean comfort woman, whom Hata runs across at a military camp in the Burmese jungle. For instance, Carroll Hamilton argues that the return of Kkutaeh as a traumatic subject disrupts Hata's nationalist narrative, causing the protagonist's eventual failure at national enfranchisement. However, this paper focuses on Hata's relationship with Bedley Run, the sleepy suburban white town, in which the protagonist settles down right after immigration to the US. The racial/racist nature of Bedley Run has not received due critical attention, although a few studies on the novel saw Hata's gestures as a survival tactic deployed against the hostile environment of his new host society. This paper, resorting to Pierre Macherey's thesis on symptomatic reading, exposes what Hata, the narrator/protagonist, hides from his readers concerning his status in his muchbeloved town; and it also explores the subversive significance of Hata's ethnic memories. The aim of this study is, after all, to map both the subversive possibilities and the limitations of Hata's immigrant narrative as a bildungsroman.

Situating the Subject within the Global Material Conditions -A Critical Review on the Theorization of Postcolonial Ideas (지구화 시기 주체 구성의 물적 토대 복원을 위한 시론 -포스트식민주의 이론화 과정에 대한 리뷰를 중심으로)

  • Kim, Sumi
    • Korean journal of communication and information
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    • v.70
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    • pp.66-94
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    • 2015
  • Postcolonialism, as a school of thought, has become enormously influential for understanding the recent phenomena of globalization. While rejecting the universalizing categories of the Enlightenment, postcolonialism has called into question the old idea of culture and identity as a transcendent regime of authenticity and purity. It has also celebrated the diasporic experiences that entail porous and hybrid cultural identities as a potential site of struggle and resistance against the dominant cultural and discursive order. It is argued, however, that postcolonial theory's emancipatory claims relating to the diversified global culture tend to be complicit with transnational capitalism that brings about global issues of material as well as cultural injustice. This article, through a thorough review of the ways the postcolonial theoretical framework has been developed and appropriated by main figures in postcolonial scholarship, seeks for a theoretical and critical strategy to grasp the complex conditions of global inequality.

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The Urban Spaces and Politics of Hybridity: Repoliticizing the Depoliticized Ethnicity in Los Angeles Koreatown (혼성성의 도시 공간과 정치 : 로스앤젤레스 한인타운에서의 탈정치화된 민족성의 재정치화)

  • Park, Kyong-Hwan
    • Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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    • v.40 no.5 s.110
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    • pp.473-490
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    • 2005
  • The term hybridity has recently emerged as one of the most popularized leitmotivs in contemporary diasporic and transnational problematics on migrants' nomadic experiences. Especially, in postcolonial politics, hybridity is argued to provide a critical 'third space' on which to challenge discursive boundaries and redescribe power-embedded history However, this paper suggests that the hybrid subject position can be easily articulated in producing new cultural discourse and empowering hegemonic subjects in certain spates. Based on distinguishing the intentional, conscious hybridity from the organic, lived hybridity, this research Intends to investigate the Janus-faced, double-edged nature of the postcolonial politics of hybridity in the case of Los Angeles Koreatown. First, I discuss how a place of organic hybridity in Koreatown can lead to challenging invented and depoliticized ethnicity. At the second half of this paper, 1 focus on understanding the ways in which new Korean American professionals and elites employ the discourse of '1.5 generation' as an intentional hybridity for empowering their own political position at a local scale. I conclusively suggest that hybridity should be a deconstructive strategy to unlearn dominant socio-spatial boundaries rather than bring about the third space as a reterritorialized political position.