Deconstructive Embrace of Nation/Nationalism in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha`s Dictee

임경규 ( Kyeong Kyu Im ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2006 현대영미소설 Vol.13 No.3

기획 특집 : 몸, 권력, 이미지 ; "본질"과 "허상"의 갈림길에서 -문화분석 범주로서의 "인종"의 유용성-

임경규 ( Kyeong Kyu Im ) 조선대학교 인문학연구원 2009 인문학연구 Vol.37 No.-

본 논문의 목적은 "인종"이 무시간적 본질이 아닌 역사적 이데올로기적 구성물이라는 전제 하에, 미국문화 연구에서 인종이 여전히 중요한 문화 분석 범주임을 입증하는 것이다. 이를 위하여 본 논문에서는 19세기에서 현재에 이르기까지 인종에 관한 중요한 논쟁을 비판적으로 고찰하면서 인종 개념의 계보를 그려보고자 한다. 소위 포스트모던 시대에 들어오면서 사회분석 범주로서의 "인종"은 상당한 논란거리가 되었으며 이에 대한 논쟁은 여전히 진행 중이다. 그간 논쟁의 핵심적 주제는 인종이 과연 "본질"인가 아니면 "허상"인가 하는 문제였다. 상당히 최근까지도 "우생학"이라 불리는 생물학적 담론이 인종에 관한 연구에서 지배적인 담론의 위치에 있었으며, 그 결과 인종은 한 개인의 정체성을 구성하는 탈역사적 본질로서 여겨졌었다. 이런 우생학 담론은 미국 내에서의 인종적 위계질서를 정당화시켜 주거나 영속화시키는 기능을 해왔다. 따라서 많은 문화비평가들은 이를 극복하고 비본질주의적인 방식으로 인종의 개념을 재정립하고자 체계적인 시도를 해왔다. 이들은 인종의 문화적 혹은 수행적 측면을 강조함으로써 인종이 결코 생물학적인 문제가 될 수 없음을 주장하였다. 그러나 몇몇 다른 비평가들은 만약 인종이 생물학적 본질이 아니라면 허상에 불과한 것이므로, 다시 말해서, 사회적으로 만들어진 거짓말에 불과한 것이므로, 거짓에 기반한 인종의 개념은 철폐하는 것이 오히려 바람직한 방향이라고 주장한다. 본 논문의 입장은 후자 쪽에 더 가깝다. 하지만 본 논문이 주장하고자 하는 것은 설령 우리가 인종이 허상에 불과한 것이라는 것을 인정한다 하더라도 인종은 여전히 문화 분석 범주로서 충분히 유의미하다는 것이다. 이는 미국 사회가 여전히 인종에 기반하여 조직화되고 있으며, 따라서 인종이 미국적 사고와 행동방식을 결정하는 핵심요소로서 기능하고 있기 때문이다. This essay insists that race is still crucial as an analytic category in American cultural studies, on the premise that race is not so much a timeless essence as a social construct that has been constructed his -torically and ideologically. In doing so, I will delineate the genealogy of race from the late 19th century to the present with brief critical reflections on several important debates on race that have been social issues. Race has indeed become a very problematic notion in this postmodern era, and critical debates are still going on. A brief examination of the genealogy of race tells us that the debates have been focused on whether race is "essence" or "illusion." Until quite recent years, the so-called eugenic discourse had been dominant in race study to the extent that biological factors were considered an ahistorical essence constituting one`s identity. Yet such biologism has been systematically challenged by many cultural critics because it possibly justifies and even perpetuates the racial hierarchy in American society. Those critics instead attempted to reconceptualize race in a non-essentialist way, arguing that race is a cultural or performative notion which has nothing to do with biological factors. Other critics, however, suggest that we should totally abandon race as an analytical category since it is nothing but an illusion or a lie unless it is an essence. My position is rather closer to the second argument. However, I would argue that although race is but an illusion or a lie, it still has some value as an analytical category in American cultural studies. It is not only because American society is still organized based on race, but also because it has some material force in shaping American way of doing and thinking.

편집증적 디아스포라 -초기 아시아계 미국인 문화에 대한 소고

임경규 ( Kyeong Kyu Im ) 21세기영어영문학회 2011 영어영문학21 Vol.24 No.4

This paper aims at rewriting the history of early Asian American people in terms of diaspora. In doing thus, I will highlight the diasporic nature of early Asian Americans, that is, their imaginary relationship with, and their cultural exchange with, Asia-an important but repressed part of Asian American subjectivity. First of all, I will define early Asian Americans as the "diaspora of paranoia" with all its Lacanian connotation. Here, the term paranoia does not refer to a particular pathological condition; it rather foregrounds the nature of early Asian immigrants` peculiar way of imagining their homelands. That is to say, for the early Asian Americans, multiplicity of one`s identity in a socially symbolic order is subsumed under a single signifier, that is, Asia. This paranoiac relationship with their homelands is structured and constructed by institutional and cultural racism of the US that barred Asians from becoming legitimate citizens of US, on the one hand, and the physical and psychical distance from their homeland that foreclosed the possibility of their ultimate return, on the other. Furthermore, early Asian Americans` paranoiac relationship with Asia gave rise to a peculiar kind of structure of feeling in their culture, which I will define as "aspiration to impossible authenticity." Of course, there is no such thing as authenticity. Nevertheless, the imagined nature of their relationship with Asia and the physical distance from it necessarily leads them to a tragic self-knowledge that they can never remain as an authentic Asian subject. I will show how this peculiar kind of structure of feeling shapes the early Asian American life and culture through a close reading of Bienvenido`s short story "Scent of Apples" which vividly encapsulates early Filipino Americans` life.

화이트 디아스포라 vs. 네이티브 디아스포라- 디아스포라 담론에 대한 비판적 고찰

임경규 ( Kyeong Kyu Im ) 21세기영어영문학회 2012 영어영문학21 Vol.25 No.4

This study aims at critically reviewing contemporary discourses of diaspora. In doing so, this study reformulates the contemporary world order as a site of battleground between what I would define as "white diaspora" and "native diaspora." This reformulation has two distinct purposes: first, to criticize the Eurocentricism inherent in contemporary diaspora discourses; second, to illuminate the seamy side of politico-economic globalization and the proliferation of discourses and practices of diaspora, which causes the social division between diasporic and nondiasporic classes. This study shows that diasporic practices are not always liberatory, especially when they are articulated with the discourse of imperialism. And I also attempt to conceive of the "mobile" native beyond the imperial-diasporic network of Empire. That is to say, what is important is that nondiasporic subjects do not remain passive victims of the global system; they emerge as another kind of diasporic subjects that are opposed to their bourgeois counterparts, or what I would call "native diaspora."

진리에 대한 충실성과 이데올로기의 호명 사이에서

임경규(Im, Kyeong Kyu) 대구대학교 인문과학연구소 2012 人文科學硏究 Vol.38 No.-

In this essay, I have two purposes. First, I will explicate French Philosopher Alain Badiou"s controversial conceptualization of subject, truth, and event, based on which, then, I will read the Korean American writer Richard Kim"s 1964 novel The Martyred. So far, this novel has been read within the tradition of Camus and Kafka and thus interpreted as a story about human suffering and its absurdity. However, Badiou"s re-conceptualization of truth and subject will help us read Reverend Shin"s lie in the novel from a totally different perspective. Against the popular postmodern assumptions about the demise of truth and subject, Badiou claims that there is truth, singular and universal, absolute and generic. Access to the realm of truth is achieved only through a procedure that can be defined as subtraction of the state power from a situation, or what he calls "truth-event." Yet this procedure is wholly subjective one and can be maintained through one"s fidelity to the truth-event. At the same time, he argues, one can be the very subject of truth and the subject of history when s/he sustains her/his fidelity to it. From this perspective, Mr. Shin"s perjury and subsequent participation in martyr-makings controled by the state and the church can be seen as a way of maintaining his fidelity to truth. He believes neither in institutional church (even God) nor in the state authority. He does believe in the very truth that people must live on, whatever they may suffer from. That is to say, he sustains his fidelity to truth, and by doing thus he can bring about a transformative event to the situation he belongs to.

조선 개화기의 옥시덴탈리즘에 대한 소고

임경규(Im, Kyeong-Kyu) 한국동서비교문학학회 2009 동서 비교문학저널 Vol.0 No.20

This study examines the Occidentalism in the late-19th-century Korea and compares it with Orientalism which is defined by Edward Said. Here, Korea’s Occidentalism refers to all the discourses and practices about the West produced by Korean people, that is to say, the ways in which Korean people imagined and related themselves to the West in one way or another. From the 1860s to 1910 (the year of Japan’s annexation of Korea), many Korean intellectuals attempted to develop and accumulate knowledge about the West in order to answer the challenges posed by the West and westernized Japan. However, their attempts stopped short of reaching the truth about the West, only resulting in encountering their own identity as a savage people -- an identity assigned to those who were considered the other of Western civilization.

에블린은 움직일 수 있는가?: 「에블린」의 “마비” 속에 숨겨진 또 다른 이야기

임경규 ( Kyeong Kyu Im ) 한국제임스조이스학회 2011 제임스조이스저널 Vol.17 No.1

This essay attempts to re-read James Joyce`s “Eveline” subversively through the famous question posed by G. C. Spivak, “Can the subaltern speak?” In doing thus, I will modify the question to “Can the subaltern move?,” through which I will critically interrogate the Joycean conception of “paralysis” in the story of “Eveline.” And I will conclude that Eveline`s final paralysis is not a sign of her inability to escape from the oppressive patriarchal, nationalistic, and imperialistic ideologies that have dominated her physically and mentally, but that it is rather a denial of the interpellation of those ideologies, although it is of course not a consciously constructed resistance on the part of Eveline. In this reading, I reconfigure the story as a battleground or what Avtar Brah calls “diasporic space” in which each character struggles to become a diaspora who can gain access to transnational mobility and find a line of flight from oppressive circumstances. However, mobility is not distributed equally because it is discursively determined by historically particular power relations and thus necessarily connected to such questions as class, gender, and nation. As a female subject of the colonized nation, therefore, Eveline cannot but be what Spivak and Jenny Sharpe call an “ex-orbitant” subject, or non-diasporic who can by no means be diasporic. She is excluded from the orbit of diasporic movement towards new home and new identity, only to be a “helpless animal.” She is literally paralyzed by the social machine called imperialism and patriarchy. Yet this paralysis can also be interpreted as an emancipatory moment for her. It is because Eveline, as an ex-orbitant subject, could be an “exorbitant” one that excesses and defies the power relations dominating her life. That is to say, her identity as an ex-orbitant could be welded with deconstructive forces which is immanent in her situation.

손필드 저택의 세 번째 이야기 - 서벌턴 텍스트로 다시 읽는 『제인 에어』 -

임경규 ( Im Kyeong-kyu ) 조선대학교 인문학연구원 2018 인문학연구 Vol.0 No.56

『제인 에어』는 어둡고 칙칙한 손필드 저택의 3층을 “과거의 집, 기억의 성지, 유령의 출몰지”로 기록한다. 과거의 유물들로 가득한 손필드 저택의 3층(third story)은 『제인 에어』가 차마 발설하지 못하는 대영제국의 “세 번째 이야기(third story)”를 상징한다고 볼 수 있다. 버사를 감금한 3층 다락방은 서인도제도에서 영국의 제국주의적 폭력이 은폐되는 공간이기 때문이다. 『제인 에어』의 표면상의 텍스트가 로체스터와 제인의 로맨스 혹은 주체적 여성으로서 제인의 성장이라고 한다면, 그리고 제인의 변증법적 그림자로서 그녀의 대칭점에 존재하는 버사의 이야기가 각각 『제인 에어』의 첫 번째 이야기와 두 번째 이야기를 구성한다고 한다면, 1층과 2층의 이야기는 또한 각각 페미니즘 비평과 탈식민주의 비평을 상징하기도 한다. 반면 제인과 버사, 혹은 남성과 여성, 중심과 주변 간의 변증법적 투쟁의 관계 속에서 억압되고 삭제된 채 오로지 흔적으로만 남아 있는 존재가 있다. 그들은 바로 제3세계 식민공간의 서벌턴이며, 그들의 이야기가 바로 『제인 에어』의 세 번째 이야기를 구성한다. 본 논문에서는 손필드 저택의 3층에 쌓인 과거의 유물들을 하나하나 발굴해 내듯 『제인 에어』의 변증법적 서사구조 속에 가려진 서벌턴의 존재 방식을 면밀히 분석하고자 한다. 이는 『제인 에어』를 일종의 서벌턴 텍스트로 읽는 것으로 텍스트 자체의 결을 거슬러 읽는 것이라 할 수 있다. In Jane Eyre, Jane describes the third story of Thornfield Hall as “a home of the past-a shrine of memory” and Mrs. Fairfax as “the ghost’s haunt” (JE 125). This essay attempts to read this third story of Thornfield as a reservoir of the hidden traces and fragments of British imperialism, because the third story of Thornfield in which Bertha was imprisoned could also be seen as concealing the violent history of British imperialism. Jane’s development as a virtuous woman and the story of Bertha as a Jane’s double respectively represents Jane Eyre’s first and second story, which usually invite feminist and postcolonialist readings of the text. Meanwhile, those subalterns who are excluded and abjected from the dialectical relationship between Jane and Bertha, women and men, center and margin constitute the third story of the text(which is defined as “subtext” or textual unconscious). This study focuses on the third story and analyzes how those abjected subaltern are incorporated into the text and what kind of function they play in the text. In a word, this essay reinterprets Jane Eyre as a subaltern text, against the grain of the text, reinvestigating seemingly trivial reminders of colonialism in the text.

정신분열적 디아스포라: 1965년 이후 아시아계 미국인의 문화에 대한 고찰

임경규 ( Kyeong Kyu Im ) 조선대학교 인문학연구소 2011 인문학연구 Vol.0 No.42

본 논문은 폴길로이가 검은 대서양 에서 이론화한 것을 토대로 1965년 이후의 아시아계 미국인 문학을 디아스포라적 관점을 통해서 접근하고자 하는 시도이다. 미국 내의 아시아계 이민자들은 어떤 방식으로건 아시아라는 기표와 디아스포라적 관계를 맺을 수밖에 없으며, 이는 아시아계 미국인들에게 특징적인 정서구조를 생산해내게 된다. 1965년 이전의 아시아계 미국인들에게 아시아는 절대성과 회귀의 염원으로 표시되는 자리였다. 그러나 세계화의 진전과 더불어 아시아는 예전의 절대적 권위를 상실한 채 ``미국``과 같은 다른 기표와 병렬적 관계에 놓이게 된다. 이는 1965년 이후의 아시아계 미국인들이 아시아를 상상하는 방식에 근본적으로 변화가 발생했음을 의미하며 이는 곧 새로운 정서구조의 생성으로 나타난다. 즉, 초기 아시아계 이민자들의 문화가 "진정성"(authenticity)에 대한 향수로 점철되었다면, 최근의 아시아계 미국인은 지리적 문화적 정체성의 다중적 분열과 더불어 "자기비체화"(self-abjection) 혹은 자기부정과 자기배설로 정의될 수 있는 새로운 정서구조를 갖게 된다. 이를 가장 극적으로 표현한 작가가 바로 1970년대의 대표적인 아시아계 미국인 문화 민족주의 작가 프랭크친과 맥신 홍킹스턴이다. 이들은 미국 내에서의 인종주의에 맞서 진정한 미국인이 되고자 하는 과정 속에서 자기 내부에 존재하는 아시아를 "비체화" 하지만, 이는 결과적으로 극단적 자기혐오에 이를 수밖에 없게 된다. 이들이 이런 모순적 상황을 극복하는 방식은 역설적이게도 "아시아적 상상계"로의 회귀하는 것이었다. 이것을 우리는 미국의 인종주의에 대한 "디아스포라적 개입"이라 정의될 수 있을 것이다. 즉, 미국과 아시아의 이마고를 초국가적 맥락 속에 병치시킴으로써 상호 비판을 가능케 함과 동시에 아시아계 미국인의 자아 영역을 병렬적으로 확장하는 것이다. 결론적으로, 아시아계 미국인은 아시아에 대한 변증법적 부정을 통해 디아스포라 속에 내재된 지리적/문화적 다중성을 실질적인 자아의 형상으로 수용하게 되는 것이다. Following Paul Gilroy`s ground-breaking study on African diasporas, this essay aims at theorizing Asian American`s diasporic experience in the United States in the post-1965 period. First of all, we could define the post-1965 Asian Americans as "diaspora of schizophrenia." For the early Asian diasporic subject, the multiplicity of one`s identity in a socially symbolic order is subsumed under a single signifier that is Asia to the degree that it occupies a pseudo-transcendental position in organizing one`s social life. On the contrary, for the post-1965 Asian American, the original homeland is no longer considered a transcendental center-it is repositioned side by side with other signifiers such as "America." That is to say, they have to live in a world of multiple significations, and their social life is thus marked by multiple belongings, multiple allegiances, and multiple locationalities. This radical change in imagined relationship with Asia gave rise to a new structure of feeling within the Asian American subjectivity, which is what I would call "self-abjection"-a willful discard of Asian part of the self. In efforts to become authentic American citizens, many Asian American cultural nationalist writers, such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin, willfully push Asia out of the domain of the self. However, the problem is that their abjection of Asian self does not guarantee their seamless assimilation into American society. Rather, it brings self-destructive effects back to them. In response to this fundamental dilemma, what they do is ironically to "return to Asia,"-more correctly, "return to old Asian heroic tradition." This return to the Asian past can be seen as a "diasporic intervention" into the American racial formation in which Asian Americans cannot but live as oriental other. By reviving and bringing the Asian imago into their present American life, Asian Americans actualize the political potential of double- or multiple-belonging that the notion of diaspora embodies. In doing so, they elevate their inevitable inauthenticity into an immanent critique of the present racial and national formation of the United States.

현대영미소설 : 잠, 배고픔, 그리고 깨어남: 개를 먹는 사람들 과 대안적 주체성

임경규 ( Kyeong Kyu Im ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2015 현대영미소설 Vol.22 No.1

This paper attempts to read Jessica Hagedorn``s problematic novel Dogeaters as an ironic mimicry of traditional bildungsroman. As Franco Moretti has noted, the traditional bildungsroman has a very specific political purpose, which is to produce a certain kind of subjectivity that is "everyday, worldly, pliant-``normal`````` (230). Dogeaters, particularly Joey Sands``s episodes, seems to imitate such a narrative of the bildungsroman by presenting Joey as a hero reaching maturity. However, Joey``s development is marked by a certain irony. He is alienated from the very process of his own development and transformation. This paper argues that his alienation toward the end of the novel is Hagedorn``s literary strategy to reveal the impossibility of the subjectivity produced by the bildungsroman and, at the same time, to explore the possibility of an alternative subjectivity - one that is not marked by intentionality, linear development and causality but by discontinuity, differance and contingency.