Eunha Na

In light of the emerging literature on North Korean defectors, the article investigates the prevalent discourses on human rights and happiness as an coercive neoliberal ideology. While earlier defector memoirs focused on political accusations of the totalitarian regime and the human rights violation in North Korea, recent memoirs have appealed to the universality of human desire to pursue “the good life.” This change reflects a discursive shift in the public perception of North Korean problems f

Staging Post-feminism in Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show Abstract Na,Eunha(SeoulNationalUniv.) This essay examines Young Jean Lee’s 2012 play Untitled Feminist Show within the emerging discourses of post-identity theater. While Lee’s play evokes the legacies of feminist performance art in the 1970s, its political and aesthetic expressions of femaleness and feminism suggest a differing vision of feminist future. Focusing on the theatricality of female bodies in display and the fluidity of

This essay examines Mike Lew’s 2018 play Teenage Dick and its barrier-free production (2022) presented by National Theater of Korea (NTOK). Barrier-free, or barrier-conscious, performances have been the focus of recent critical attention in the field of disability studies in theater. Drawing upon discourses in empathy and disability theater, I argue for the political and aesthetic possibilities of barrier-free performance for non-disabled audiences. Set in a modern-day high school where disabled

Hoon-sung Hwang’s The Evolution of Modern English Drama (2020) charts the genealogy of dramatists from Ibsen to Beckett and intervenes in the long-standing debate on modernism and postmodernism. Positing the Holocaust as a defining historical juncture after which the project of the Enlightenment gave way to the affective experience of the postmodern sublime, this book delineates a genealogy of dramatic works from Henrik Ibsen to Samuel Beckett under the rubric of modern and postmodern aesthetics

In light of the latest Black Lives Matter movement, this essay revisits the convoluted Afro-Korean history in the U.S. that culminated in the 1992 Los Angeles riots to rethink the meaning of solidarity in the context of racial capitalism. The unprecedented global movement towards transnational and cross-racial alliances has evoked the history of racial triangulation and mutual struggle under white supremacy, as the two racial minorities have vied for political and cultural citizenship. Korean-Ca

The essay examines two contemporary American plays that portray adult Korean American adoptees’ return to South Korea: How to Be a Korean Woman (2012) by Sunmee Chomet and Middle Brother (2014) by Eric Sharp. While the existing scholarship on transnational adoption has discussed homecoming as a predominantly female experience of birth mothers and daughters, Chomet and Sharp suggest the differing ways in which the adoptee subjectivity is re-imagined in particularly gendered ways after homecoming.

The essay examines two contemporary American plays that portray adult Korean American adoptees’ return to South Korea: How to Be a Korean Woman (2012) by Sunmee Chomet and Middle Brother (2014) by Eric Sharp. While the existing scholarship on transnational adoption has discussed homecoming as a predominantly female experience of birth mothers and daughters, Chomet and Sharp suggest the differing ways in which the adoptee subjectivity is re-imagined in particularly gendered ways after homecoming.

The article investigates the subversive possibilities and limitations of Eliza’s acting in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion(1914), focusing on the recurring trope of the marionette. Drawing upon the emergent discourses on automaton at the turn of the twentieth century, which coincided with the early modernist attempts to eliminate human actors on stage, the article demonstrates how the heroine’s transformation from a flower girl to a perfect duchess evokes ambivalent feelings of fascination and a

Focusing on recent women`s solo performances on transnational adoption, this paper examines the ways in which the female body in performance challenges as well as reproduces prevalent narratives around adoption such as fantasies of identity and origin. In N/A (2012) by Katie Leo and Motherlanded (2016) by Julia Gay, the performer`s body becomes a source of knowledge and a site of frustration, through which she discovers and reimagines her ties to her mother/land. Leo`s investigation into her blo

This essay examines the concept of haptic spectatorship as evoked in Lynn Nottage’s 2003 play Intimate Apparel, where the sense of touch emerges as a powerful and yet vulnerable way for a Black female protagonist to navigate differences of race, religion, class, and sexuality. The play mobilizes various images of textiles and forms of touch as primary modes of contact and communication across material differences such as race, class, and religion as they mediate feelings between bodies on stage

This essay examines the 2017 Korean production of Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven (Yongbiŏch’ŏn’ga [용비어천가]) as a case study to consider the construction of racialized spectatorship. While the production revealed the conundrums of staging Lee’s multicultural and multiracial text, the aesthetic failure allows us to rethink the construction of racialized spectatorship in modern and contemporary Korean theater. Re-enacted by Korean actors for Korean audiences, Yongbiŏch’ŏn’ga

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. June 2016. Major: English. Advisor: Josephine Lee. 1 computer file (PDF); iv, 178 pages.

In light of emerging interest in the long-overlooked figure of Afong Moy, purported to be the very first Chinese woman to set foot in the United States, this essay analyzes Lloyd’s Suh’s 2018 play The Chinese Lady. Widely publicized as “The Chinese Lady,” Moy performed mundane rituals of Chinese culture before the American public in numerous venues including P. T. Barnum’s famous American Museum from 1834 to 1851. The Chinese Lady reconstructs the highly racialized and gendered exhibition space