Suk Koo Rhee

J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace is no less controversial than his previous works for its usual vague politics and employment of problematic racial/gender discourses. The novel evolves around two sexual incidents: One is David Lurie's relationship with Melanic Isaacs, a colored student of his, and the other is three blacks' violation of Lucy, Lurie's daughter. Lurie finds himself facing a sexual harassment charge as a consequence of a sexual relationship with his Romantics student. At an inquiry, Lurie,

Most previous studies on A Gesture Life focused on illuminating the role and significance of Kkutaeh, the Korean comfort woman, whom Hata runs across at a military camp in the Burmese jungle. For instance, Carroll Hamilton argues that the return of Kkutaeh as a traumatic subject disrupts Hata’s nationalist narrative, causing the protagonist’s eventual failure at national enfranchisement. However, this paper focuses on Hata’s relationship with Bedley Run, the sleepy suburban white town, in which

Consumable Bodies and Ethnic (Hi)Stories: Strategies and Risks of Representation in A Gesture Life Suk Koo Rhee (bio) [T]he figure of the Asian immigrant has served as a "screen," a phantasmatic site, on which the nation projects a series of condensed, complicated anxieties regarding external and internal threats to the mutable coherence of the national body: the invading multitude, the lascivious seductress, the servile yet treacherous domestic. —Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts What is the nature of

Suk Koo RheeLouise Erdrich's Love Medicine has received great attention from many critics for its narrative form. The use of multiple narrators, who tell mini-stories about their own lives, has been at the center of the critical debate. This narrative device has been attributed by critics, such as Helen Jaskoski, to the influence of William Faulkner, whom the author herself acknowledged as one of her mentors, while the same device has been explained by other critics as part of the oral tradition

In R. L. Stevenson's Treasure Island, the motif of the treasure hunt resonates strongly with the economic realities of eighteenth-century Britain, particularly when viewed within the context of the British joint venture boom. This boom erupted in its most hysterical form in the ‘South Sea Company Craze’ of 1720. In Stevenson's fiction, overseas joint ventures and high seas piracy share certain implicit commonalities, though one of these is never mentioned – or, more accurately, it is repressed.

This study is premised on the question of whether or not the influences of L'Étudiant noir have been unduly inflated upon the black intellectuals in Paris from the French colonies during the early twentieth century. It also raises the question of if the tenet of Négritude can be summarized only as "Return to pure African values." The study argues that even when Senghor and Césaire cried for the African spirit, they did not take their eyes off cultural hybridity. For instance, Senghor from the ea

This paper attempts to re-appraise the so-called “objective” vision of V. S Naipaul through analyzing the way the Third World nations and their cultures are represented in the author’s diverse fictions and non-fictions. What has motivated this research is the need to respond to two particular tendencies in recent criticism on the 2001 Nobel Prize laureate. One is to read postmodern features into his work, according to which Naipaul’s work articulates the postmodern thesis that no one occupies th

Arif Dirlik in Postmodernity’s Histories sees the issue of re-ethnicization in the case of John Huang, China’s alleged attempt at lobbying the Clinton administration. In this view, Americans with Chinese surnames were suspected by the US Justice Department to be possible spies working for Beijing. Reethnicization here seems to serve the mainstream society in reducing an ethnic minority to a group of aliens operating for their countries of origin. However, re-ethnicization is not necessarily a on

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said, by forsaking his earlier post- structuralist tendency, seems to have successfully tackled the theoretical problems of which many postcolonial critics accused his earlier work, Orientalism. In this later work, Said also tries to present a balanced cultural criticism by discussing both the artistic values of the British canons and their ideological service to the Empire, whereas he earlier criticized by wholesale both the European empires and their literatu

This paper views Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s controversial novel Dictée as promoting a feminist politics based on sympathy across national boundaries. This way it distances itself from the kind of criticism, initiated by Elaine H. Kim, that emphasizes the need to contextualize the novel within Korean history and/or the experience of Korean American women. This paper notes the fact that Cha’s novel starts with a story about a young female Korean immigrant, then moves on to bringing to focus quite a f

Dans Mademoiselle ( The Handmaiden), le réalisateur Park Chan-wook utilise la culture érotico-grotesque de la Corée coloniale pour faire la lumière sur la lutte des femmes pour leur agentivité. L’auteur fait état de l’agentivité des femmes par la victimisation, dont l’économie affective est enracinée dans les relations coloniales d’un espace culturel coréen. Il se penche particulièrement sur le jeu de pouvoir optique entre Hideko et le patriarcat impérial dans le film de Park, afin de mettre à l

The concept of the “diaspora” has established itself as one of the major topics in literary and cultural studies in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Contemporary studies on this topic tend to regard is diaspora as either as a liberatory space unmoored from a repressive national identity-formation or as a condition pregnant with challenges to the authority of a nation-state or nationalism. Viewed from within the social realities of multi-ethnic nations, however, diaspora has an