Panel 54: Asian American Literature

Chair: Hana Kang, University of Notre Dame

Panelists

Ina Choi, University of Pennsylvania, “Precarious Intimacy: Affective Embodiment of Hak Kyung Cha’s Language, Material and Body”

This paper explores affective embodied experiences in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s visual, textual and performance works. Scholarly attention has focused on her literary work, Dictée, since the seminal publication of Writing Self, Writing Nation (1994), a collection of essays on Dictée that aimed to reconstruct ethnicity, feminism and nationality. In this paper, I re-engage her textual and performance art works in the context of 70’s art in the United States as well as the Asian/Korean-American context. Traveling through her works between text, medium and bodies, I encounter a cumulative, palimpsestic textured emotive sense that grew to a methodological tenet of what I would call “text-ured affect” that embraces text, context, and material property surrounding her works. Undoing and tracing such bodily affect from the entangled cohabitation between language and materials, this paper will explore how her works yield neither to theoretical abstraction of the 70’s art scene nor to contextual fixity that was related to the ideological driven art of the times. I will argue that any formal, deconstructive, conceptual-driven event or object cannot be disassociated from life or history, and that such fragile but crucially connected relationality between forms and stories, non-human mediums and human subjects, offers different grounds of aesthetic solidarity. In doing so, the paper will address how the text, mediums and bodies are in intimate but precarious relations with context and history and how such embodied experience produces indeterminate but “culturally sensitive affect” that offers an alternative sociality beyond the subject-bounded ground.

Hana Kang, University of Notre Dame, “Navigating Identities: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Korean American Adolescent Male Characters in Multicultural Literature”

This study employs critical discourse analysis to explore how Korean American adolescent multicultural literature constructs identities, focusing on male protagonists. Despite the growing popularity of Asian American multicultural literature, there is a noticeable absence of portrayals depicting Korean American fathers and male protagonists. Through a case study of “Troublemaker” by John Cho, this research investigates how the author portrays the challenges faced by young Korean American males as they navigate immigrant family dynamics and confront model minority stereotypes.

The findings unveil intricate father-son conflicts arising from cultural disparities, linguistic barriers influenced by model minority expectations, and entrenched traditional communication styles within Korean families. These dynamics underscore significant power imbalances and elaborate identity formations, particularly in the negotiation between Korean and American identities. The utilization of Korean-English code-switching in the narrative signifies traditional Korean hierarchical communication patterns, contributing to intergenerational conflicts.

Examining historical events like the LA riots, “Troublemaker” reveals intergenerational trauma and its repercussions on identity development, prompting contemplation and reevaluation of Korean American identity. The outcomes also illuminate how Asian American men perceive themselves vis-à-vis societal perceptions, especially concerning Western ideals of masculinity and the ideal of the American family dynamic. The study considers generational discrepancies in identity construction and associated levels of distress, emphasizing the intricate interplay between cultural norms and individual self-perceptions within the Asian American male experience.