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"Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee is both the ancestor and the future of all attempts to remember and rewrite—against the force of being dismembered and rewritten by—colonial/imperial histories and their reiterative, disfiguring shadows. I have, for that reason, the feeling, maybe also the fear, that neither the experience nor the revelation of it will ever come to an end."—Brandon Shimoda, PEN America Literary Award winner and author of The Grave on the Wall
"You think you know what a book can do, then you read Dictee. A life is split by it. A text of multiple modes and languages, moving in a staccato accumulation through histories of war and displacement, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s postcolonial classic created ways and privacies where there were none. Unimaginable what literature would be today without it."—Solmaz Sharif, author of Customs
"Dictee is part memoir, part history, part experimental meditation; a challenging, innovative exploration of Cha’s life, her mother’s difficult immigrant journey across East Asia and to the United States, the fractured immigrant experience, women warriors, and language itself. . . . An essential work for feminist writers, conceptual artists and Asian American authors and scholars."—New York Times
About the author
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982) was a poet, filmmaker, and artist who earned her BA and MA in comparative literature and her BA and MFA in art from the University of California, Berkeley.
