• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.34
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• pp.147-172
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• 2014

The Guatemalan government and guerrilla forces(the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteco, URNG) signed peace accord in 1996, and ended civil conflict(1960-1996). The bloodiest governments of the 36-year-lond armed conflict were those of Lucas Garc?a, R?os Montt and Mej?a V?ctores, between 1978 and 1983. The war that Guatemala underwent resulted in more than 200,000 casualties, more than 83% of them Mayan, according to the report of the CEH(Comision para de Esclarecimiento Historico). 'Victoria 82' and 'Opreation Sof?a' were the strategy of military dictatorship to destory indigenous Mayan communities. This paper is to demonstrates that the Guatemalan state perpetrated a genocide against the indigenous population using racism to strengthening modern nation-state and this was because, historically and structurally, it possessed, in its intrinsic naturem the repressive, ideological and legal apparatus. To distinguish Maya from ladino is often linked to cultural and social discrimination and a system of racial ranking. Militaty dictatorship used the system of racial ranking to exterminate indigenous populations.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1123-1137
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• 2009

Revisiting the horror of slave mutiny in nineteenth century America via Julia Kristeva's concept of abject, this essay examines abject fear in Amasa Delano and Babo's subversive act to deceive Delano in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno." Babo, the slave, exercises subversive power, thereby reversing racial hierarchy aboard the slave ship-the San Dominick. Babo's ability to mimic and control racial stereotypes exposes how nineteenth-century racial hierarchy was only a social fiction, which becomes the very source of Delano's fear. Delano's dread belies upon the possible disruption of social order triggered by Babo'sblack rebellion. In order to repress his fear, Delano consciously and unconsciously attempts to re-inscribe white dominion and reaffirm black inferiority and stereotypes by means of rationalizing the disturbing signs he witnesses on the San Dominick. When Delano discovers the realsituation of the ship, he must relinquish the abject resonance that disturbs the previous racial order. Employing a legal document, Delano re-inscribes the official position of the blacks as slaves, defining them as violent savages, and thereby silences Babo. However, Melville's text is not a testament to white power. "Benito Cereno" actually endorses abject instability to challenge racial hierarchies through the poignant image of Babo's dead gaze in the last scene of the novella. Thus, "Benito Cereno" exemplifies the recurring power of abject as a threat to social hierarchy and as a constant reminder of the falsity and insecurity of a social order.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.311-335
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• 2014

Those who are damned in Light in August (1932) include Lena Grove, Joe Christmas as well as Gail Hightower. Through these characters, William Faulkner criticizes the confrontation between the North and the South after Civil War, religious fundamentalism, and racial discrimination which were great social issues in the twentieth century American society. The main characters are commonly isolated from the community through their grandfather's influence instead of father, which lets Americans understand that their faults originated from the beginning of America. Although they tend to approach to the community from their isolation, the damned are refused from the community. However, Faulkner would not lose his hope even on the ground of Christmas's death. By evoking from Hightower and Bunch their responses for good, Lena can draw Hightower into the community, and create her home with Bunch as a final victor. Even in the community being rampant with racial hatred, which most of Americans can not but face with, Faulkner can provide us with a ray of hope through these three characters.

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

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.1
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• pp.147-170
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• 2011

This paper elucidates the characteristics of transnational adoption, estimates the possibility of beyond-borders identity of transnational adoptees, and tries to analyze Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood in its context. Though it has been regarded as one of the most humanitarian ways of helping orphans and poor children of the world, transnational adoption, a one-way flow of children from poor Asian countries to rich white countries, has been operated under the market logic between countries. Transnational adoptees, who had been abandoned and forced to be taken away from their birth mother, and later, to fulfill the desire of white parents for a perfect family, perform an ideological labor, serving to make the heterogeneous nuclear family complete. Korean transnational adoptees, forced to transcend the borders of nation, culture, and ethnicity, experience racial conflict and alienation in white adoptive family and society. Their diaspora experience of violent dislocation creates frustration and confusion in establishing their identity as a whole being. When they return to Korea to find their birth mother and their true identity, Korean adoptees, however, are faced with other obstructing issues, such as language problem, culture conflict, and maternal nationalism. Finally, Korean transnational adoptees reject Korean nationalism discourse based on blood, and try to redefine themselves as beyond-borders subjectivities with new and fluid identities. Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood, an autobiographical novel based on her experiences as a transnational adoptee, represents a Korean adopted girl's personal, cultural, and racial conflict within her white adoptive family, and questions the image of benevolent white mother and the myth of multiculturalism. The novel further represents Jane's return to Korea to find out her true identity, and shows Jane's disappointment and alienation in her birth country due to her ignorance of language and culture. Returning to USA again, and trying to be reconciled with her American mother, Jane shows the promise of accepting her new identity capable of transcending the borders, and thus, the possibility of enlarging the category of belonging.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1163-1191
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• 2009

As many critics do, this article starts from the premise that Charles Waddell Chesnutt wrote The Conjure Woman with a distinct socio-ethical view to ameliorating white readers' racism. For this purpose of social activism, first, the author uses a racially submissive genre and narrator- antebellum plantation-dialect fiction and an old ex-slave Julius-in order to win the attention of white racists, who constituted the majority of the reading public of postbellum America. Chesnutt then allows this seemingly submissive ex-slave consecutively to wage narrative battles against a Northern white capitalist, John. This fiction's structure is thus based on interracial narrative conflict. Granted, the result of these narrative battles is Julius's defeat. Even though he sometimes has narrative success through his manipulation of either his white female auditor's sentimentalism or the white capitalist's racial prejudice, it does not lead to any fundamental change in the white audience members' awareness: John still regards Julius's tacitly reformoriented tales merely as nonsensical ghost stories invented by the absurd imagination of a subservient, entertaining, and exploitable black coachman. Admitting his defeat, Julius relinquishes his original goal of deterring John's capitalist exploitation of both racial Others and the natural environment of the South and finally decides to serve the economic power of white capitalism. This self-defeating conclusion, however, should not be identified with Chesnutt's failure as an author. Rather, it should be understood as an interim result of the black author's earnest experiment with literary media best suited to his reform project. In fact, this narrative failure reveals Chesnutt's accurate diagnosis of the postbellum literary world: a black voice is still feebly heard and even easily buried by the whites' capitalist ambition and consequently intensifying racism. Conclusively, Julius's narrative failure should be positively evaluated as Chesnutt's one step further in his gradual and lifelong progress to a narrative goopher effectively to engage whites' imagination and sympathy for a vision of equal interracial coexistence.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.809-837
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• 2012

Philip Roth rejects the narrative unity and singularity of the traditional novel and creates instead a multi-levelled, fragmentary, and repetitive narrative. It is not easy to distinguish fact from fiction in The Plot Against America. As an entertaining and creative work of the postmodern historiographic metafiction, Philip Roth's The Plot Against America interrogates the existence of historically verifiable facts, the validity of authentic and official version of history, and reexamines the narrative conventions of history writing. The aim of this paper is to examine Roth's narrative experiment or 'thought experiment' and to explore the intention of creating alternative history in The Plot Against America. Roth does a 'thought experiment' in The Plot Against America. In this cautionary "what if" political fable, Roth hypothesizes that in 1940 aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, an ardent isolationist who was sympathetic to Hiltler, won the presidency. Jewish communities are stunned and terrified as America flirts with fascism and anti-semitism. Reimagining his children-with considerable fact mixed in with the fiction-Roth narrates an alternative history that has an unsettling plausibility. Roth has constructed a brilliantly telling and disturbing historical prism by which to refract the American psyche as it pertain to the discord of individual, race, history in The Plot Against America. Roth analyzes the life of individual in a historic space, the situation of anti-semitism in world of invisible order, racial conflict between black and white in world of visible order, and the darkest side of national power in this work. Roth's stories argue for the equality of various cultures grounded on the common notion of humanity, for an ethic of mutual respect, and for the peaceful resolution of conflicts.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.311-324
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• 2017

This study has the purpose of geopolitical analysis on the role, function and problem of (trans) frontier park in Southern Africa. Frontier parks in Southern Africa had been used as a buffer zone between colonial empires and British colonial administration during the colonial period and as an interdiction zone of communism and black liberation movement during the apartheid regime, the cold war and the civil war. The ecological transfrontier peace parks in Southern Africa which is integrating the adjacent Frontier parks is utilized as a means of a conflict resolution and peace building after the end of cold war, civil war and apartheid regime, The ecological transfrontier peace parks in Southern Africa is very highly regarded as an effective means for a conflict resolution and peace building. But it is also being criticized for a reproduction of South Africa's politico-economic domination and of a socio-spatial division between racial groups.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.65-102
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• 2018

This paper focuses on "The Story of $Bras-Coup{\acute{e}}$" in George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes (1880), a story to and around which Cable claimed the larger work was built. It tells of an African candio sold into slavery who, to the dismay of his white purchasers, refuses to work, strikes his master, and runs away to lead a life of a fugitive in the swamps. He is finally captured, whipped, and maimed, but not before he casts a powerful voodoo curse at his master and his plantation. He dies a heroic death, with the last words that he goes "To--Africa." Cable once said that he "meant The Grandissimes as truly a political work as it ever has been called." It is a political work in that $Bras-Coup{\acute{e}}^{\prime}s$ personal rebellion is associated with much-feared slave revolts, especially the black revolution in San Domingue/Haiti. There is also $Honor{\acute{e}}$ f.m.c. (free man of color), one of the narrators of "The Story of $Bras-Coup{\acute{e}}$" and a stand-in for the Freedmen in the postbellum United States, who nurses his own insurrectionary flame. Through these figures Cable makes a "terrible suggestion" that a black revolution is on the horizon unless whites would not mend their ways soon.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.39
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• pp.83-95
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• 2015

Every country has a dark history in the process of transition to a modern state. Many countries have until the 21st century, especially in East Asia, colonialism, has experienced conflict influenced, racial discrimination, the trauma of such massacre. Such a dark history in many countries are also still in progress. Dark History of China, which maintains the proletarian dictatorship is the 'Cultural Revolution(Wenhua da Geming)'. 'Cultural Revolution' is neither the outer aspect of the ideological struggle, but in fact it was not even class struggle ideology and class struggle. Put an end to the feudal intellectuals in China in the course of the tragedy stood and lead to build a new China suffered the humiliation of being betrayed from state power. Chinese writers after the 'Cultural Revolution' ended, was created in the process of creation reflects the tragedy of the 'Cultural Revolution' in the country(national memory) is suffering from the pain and suffering the same growth process as it saw this novel growth experienced in the personal growth process. "Road leaving at 18 years" of WiHua has ruled out the pain of growing national attention wholly to personal growth and pain. Such "Road leaving at 18 years" in the sense suggests the possibility of a typical growth story in China Contemporary Literature.