한국계 미국인 남성 작가 소설들에 나타나는 식민지/탈식민주의 정체성 탐색

초록

This paper aims to explore how Korean American male writers construct and deconstruct the Korean American male subjectivity by closely reading and analyzing three novels: Richard Kim’s Lost Names, Younghill Kang’s East Goes West, and Chang Rae Lee’s Gesture Life. These fictions are selected on purpose to reflect chronological changes of Korean male subjectivity in literature. As theoretical scaffoldings, I used postcolonial theories, especially Homi Bhabha’s concept of ambivalence. In Lost Names, an unnamed Korean boy, the protagonist and the narrator of the novel, experiences colonial violence to find his way of forming decolonial subjectivity by resisting it; yet, this subjectivity cannot but embed the fragility of the subjectivity imbued by nationalism. Kang, Younghill’s East Goes West critically deconstructs cosmopolitan dream of a Korean American male, Chungpa Han, by showing how farcical it is regarded in American society where colonialism is contextualized with racism and capitalism. Last, Chang Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life reveals how Korean American subjectivity is compromised by postcolonial ambivalence that lacks its resistance, which transforms Hata, the protagonist, into a pathologically faked life, mere gesture without authentic humanity.

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