Of Bodies and Things: The Korean as Commodity Fetish

Abstract

This dissertation studies the intertwined construction of national subjects in both South Korea and the United States. Through a transnational examination of Korean and Korean American literature, I track how the impact of these overlapping structures in both nations’ remaking of national identity necessitated a re-thinking of the national subject. I propose that the construction of the national subject is embedded within a number of interrelated processes including 1) the neo-imperial entanglement of South Korea with the United States; 2) the modernization of the two nations as not only an economic but also a discursive project; and 3) the spread of neoliberalism and its bearing upon the racialization of Koreans and Korean Americans. Koreans were repeatedly re-imagined to befit the new social order. By exploring how the figure of Korean is re-situated as an ideal citizen along the axes of immigrants/emigrants and national/alien, I track the changing perception of the nation-state and different forms of national belonging. I suggest that the processes of constructing and reforming these modern subjectivities and of dismembering prior forms of selfhood and social order are rehearsed discursively in transnational Korean literature. In particular, I illustrate how unresolved contradictions and competing social structures are displaced and worked out in the realm of the literary. I contend that the colonial and postcolonial modernization of South Korea, as well as the socio-cultural suspicion that followed Korean immigrants as they entered the United States, produced distinctive styles of narrative inventiveness in subjects who had to negotiate multiple expectations and multilayered histories. I read this stylistic distinctiveness as an enactment of the overlapping histories of South Korea and the United States. Furthermore, my project questions generic practices of thinking and articulating racial, ethnic, and national identities. In particular, I demonstrate how the transnational Korean novel complicates the national form not only through a re-imagination of the contours of the nation but also through a re-invention of traditional novelistic genres, including the Bildungsroman, the picaresque, and the ethnic novel. I consider these traditional novelistic genres in relation to the possibility of co-determining generic conventions and national impositions by examining what might be seen as a singular ethno-racial group—namely, transnational Koreans—who may share this ethno-racial identification but not geographical and national positions.