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This volume examines the engagement with national histories, citizenship, and the larger transnational contexts in the narrative plot lines in selected twentieth-century Korean American novels. Critics have often expected, or even demanded, that the Korean American novel present the ideal and coherent American citizen-subject in a linear bildungsroman plotline.
Many novels - Younghill Kang's East Goes West, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, to name a few - do deal with the idea of an "American identity", however, they consistently problematize such identification through multiple and conflicting national memories, historic eras, and geopolitical terrains. The novels are typically set in contemporary America, but they often refer either to the regional context and era of Japan's colonization of Korea (1910-1945) or the Korean War (1950-1953). The novels' characters are "lost in transnation", contextualizing the multiple and multiply-interrelated national contexts and time periods that have formed immigrants and Korean Americans in the twentieth century.
List of contents
Acknowledgments - The Geopolitics of Narration: An Introduction to the Historical, National, and Narrative Patterns in 20th-Century Korean American Novels - Race, Nation, and Migration: "Disidentifications" in Younghill Kang's East Goes West - The Cosmopolitics of the 20th-Century Korean American Subject: "Leaping" in Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life - "A Circle Within a Circle, a Series of Concentric Circles": The Manifold Subjectivities of the Korean/Korean American Woman in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee - Conclusion - Bibliography - Index.
About the author
David S. Cho (Ph.D., University of Washington) is Associate Professor of English and Director of the American Ethnic Studies Program at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
Summary
This volume examines the engagement with national histories, citizenship, and the larger transnational contexts in the narrative plot lines in selected twentieth-century Korean American novels.
Report
"David S. Cho's subjectless history of the Asian American novel is ground breaking. In order to bring out the diversity of Asian American experiences and identities in modern American English writing, he adopts the most logical orientation to this history. He avoids presenting an essentialized Asian American identity or experience, notwithstanding its hybridity. He resolves rather to present the conditions pertaining to the different migrant experiences to throw light on the underlying cultural and ideological tensions, in the fashion of non-representational thinking. The approach liberates him to bring out the politics and aesthetics of his chosen works with sensitive analysis and ethical complexity." «Suresh Canagarajah, Pennsylvania State University»
