유목민의 혁명: 캐씨 박 홍의 『댄스 댄스 혁명』의 들뢰즈적 읽기

Abstract

This paper analyzes Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong, one of the leading second-generation Asian-American poets, and explores the meaning of revolution in its title and how it is related to the position of the poet belonging to an ethnic minority. To explore the nature of the revolution carried out by the poet, this study will employ some Deleuzean concepts such as nomad, rhizome, and deterritorialization. Dance Dance Revolution is a poem sequence in two voices. The Guide, a migrant or nomad working for a hotel in the Desert, is a former Korean dissident from the Kwangju Uprising of 1980. While she speaks a hybridized language called Desert Creole, the Historian interviews the Guide and annotates her commentaries in standard English. The Desert Creole spoken by the Guide is a rhizomatic combination of multiple languages including English and Korean. Crossing the borderlines of various deterritorialized languages, the poet carries out a revolution by which she challenges and subverts the dominancy of the major language. Praising the “beige population” reproduced by miscegenating couples in the Desert, Hong presents the image of genuine ethnic diversity. The poet also problematizes the validity of official history hiding and erasing many meaningful historical facts. In this poem sequence, Hong presents an imagined place, where ethnically diverse people liberated from the repression of historical and cultural roots use hybrid languages without reserve.