Organizer: Helen H. Koh, Columbia University
Chair and Discussant: Nancy Abelmann, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
This panel discusses narratives of dislocation in Korean and Korean-American culture in an effort to examine migration/immigration in a global context. In the present age of global capitalism, migration is largely caused by the demand for labor, which organizes the concentration and movement of vast numbers of workers and their families. Many South Korean writers have revealed the unequal effects of the depopulation of rural areas, the widespread dislocation of families, and the breakdown of rural community. Korean American writers have often documented the ways in which immigration and racialization within the U.S. are over-determined by neo-colonial relations between the U.S. and South Korea. To articulate the most effective critique of enforced dislocation, this panel contends that we must bring together projects within Asian studies and Asian American studies.
Migration involves the movement from one location to another across geographical boundaries and cultural experiences. As a condition of displacement, the migrant is exiled and preoccupied with memories of what was lost. However, migration can mean more than loss, and in this panel we are also interested in dislocation as a process of transfiguration. In a dialectical relation with the experience of migration, subjectivities can be recreated and remade in and by the new environment. To fully consider migration, we turn to narratives of dislocation as transfigurative possibility, to complement and challenge the predominantly sociological research on these questions.
Dreamers, Artists and Other Wanderers: Kim Won-il’s "The Kite" (Yon)
Helen H. Koh, Columbia UniversityIn Kim Won-il’s "The Kite" (Yon, 1979) the image of the free-flying kite invokes the freedom to wander without destination or purpose. Traditionally, the idea of stability has been tied to an enduring relationship with a place and a community, but the text examines how wandering allows the individual the possibility of social and imaginative freedom. Written in the late-1970s during the height of Yusin authoritarianism, "The Kite" explores the difficulty of artistic freedom during a time when economic development was used to deny freedom of expression and demand social conformity. While millions of South Koreans were forced to migrate to the cities in search of work, in this text wandering represents a positive "dislocation" that enables the individual to resist the prevailing social conditions. Dreamers, artists, and wanderers represent social categories outside the realm of production to show how wandering negates the social and economic structures on which capitalism relies. However, wandering is not presented as a glorified or heroic condition of absolute self. Instead, by juxtaposing wandering as utopian freedom with the idea of "homeplace" as stability, the writer shows that the very possibility of wandering, and implicitly artistic imagination, is not possible without the acceptance and perseverance of the family and society.
What’s Love Got to Do with It?: Greg Pak’s "Fighting Grandpa"
Grace Kyungwon Hong, Princeton UniversityReading for tropes of generational conflict and of "culture clash" (or being "torn between two cultures") creates a genre of "family narrative" in Asian American literature and film which is recuperable for standard American narratives of immigration and assimilation based on a white ethnic immigrant model. In this presentation, I argue that Korean-American filmmaker Greg Pak’s short film "Fighting Grandpa" (1998) resists such recuperations by foregrounding the relationship between gendered family structures and global circuits of labor and capital.
Pak centers his film around the question of whether his grandmother and his grandfather were ever in love. In the course of answering this question, Pak traces his grandmother’s life: her career as a midwife and nurse in Korea; her virtual abandonment by her husband (Pak’s grandfather) during and after the Korean War which necessitated her raising her six children alone; her eventual immigration to Hawaii to rejoin her husband; and the hardships she encountered upon her entry into the U.S. Pak skillfully intersperses documentary footage of photographs, letters, and memorabilia with interviews with his father, his aunts and uncles, and with his grandmother herself.
"Fighting Grandpa" intervenes in conventional narratives of immigration and assimilation by critiquing the narrative of romantic love, in which marriage is the resolution of material and economic difficulties. It also intervenes in narratives which would suggest that immigration to the U.S. is a mode of gendered emancipation from the "backward" patriarchy of Asia. Ultimately, by foregrounding the ways in which gender is a constitutive part of the immigration experience, this film underscores the ways in which the colonial and neocolonial circuits of labor and capital which link Korea and Hawaii as vital sites for the United States’ protection of economic interests in the Pacific Rim are dependent on these processes of gendering.
The Late Koryô Court of Kongmin Wang as an Allegory of Post-1945 Korean Politics: A Literary and Historiographical Analysis of Younghill Kang’s "A Murder in the Royal Palace"
Walter Lew, University of California, Los AngelesWithin a decade of his emigration from Korea after participating in the March First Movement, the first Korean-American novelist, Younghill Kang (Kang Yong-hûl; b. 1899, d. 1972) began to publish on a wide range of cultural and political topics in prominent American venues. Nonetheless, recent discussion of Kang has been mainly limited to a few instances of Asian American literary criticism that unfairly castigate Kang for supposedly betraying nationalist causes. To understand, however, the complexities of Kang’s writing, especially after he began working in 1941 for the U.S. government (including a stint as chief of publications for the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea), one must utilize insights and methodologies drawn from both traditional and modern Korean historiography and literary criticism, as well as High Modernist theories of translation.
A case in point is Kang’s unpublished play, "A Murder in the Royal Palace." Whereas Kang’s last novel, East Goes West (1937), was set in jazz Age America, "A Murder" freely re-envisions the years (roughly 1365–71) during which the notorious Buddhist priest Sin Ton dominated Koryô King Kongmin’s court to construct an allegory of political deceit in post-1945 South Korea, Kang’s main target being Syngman Rhee. The play also expresses Kang’s hopes for a populist defeat of corrupt politicians and the rebirth of Korean folk culture. Comparison with early Chosôn chronicles, post-1945 histories, and colonial-era historical novels on Kongmin Wang’s reign help reveal both the sources and uniqueness of Kang’s efforts. Branded a "leftist" and constantly surveilled, Kang reconnected with certain currents in Korean literature and historiography to create a veiled critique of Cold War geopolitics once there was no safe place from which he could speak openly in either South Korea or McCarthy Era America.