Locating Narratives of Diasporas and/or Émigré Otherness in National Literatures: With Some Examples from Croatian, Serbian and Korean Émigré Fiction

Abstract

In this article the emphasis is on the procedures in which the ethnic and émigré literature discourses are considered and defined in theoretical writing and how are they evaluated in the process of canonization in national literatures, or within the circle of their academic and political hegemonic frames . At the centre of attention will be two questions. The first question is allied with the poststructuralist question of otherness which nowadays is still central to a number of post-structural methodological approaches in literary and cultural studies, from deconstruction and post-colonial theory to multicultural and gender studies. Its implications are discussed in the context of post-Foucauldian poststructuralist theories of discourse, in ideas about the distribution of power and in the context of the re-construction of history of displaced others in relation to the now-alienated imaginary space of possible inclusion. By that I mean the original environment from which the émigré writer is physically excluded. The second question is concerned with the location of the displaced voice in both corpus and cannon, and with the bridging of a gap in time and space which in émigré literature is not only a temporal issue but also spatial. It often represents a poly-ethnic and dispersed discursive realm, rather than an ethno-centric and biased position hostile to the dominant hegemonic order. All this represents a dynamic interaction of fields and includes the process of historicizing discourse in a process of re-canonizing and re-evaluating the current strategies in rewriting national literatures’ histories and their dealings with their own others. I will argue that this process of diverting the traditional historicism of closed communal discourses into a multicultural and intercultural environment is embedded in the otherness that is produced as a reading against being positioned in a host nation’s paradigms. The fact is that host nations often try to impose new meanings and paradigms onto the foreign body of displaced émigré writing and to forcefully position them in their imagined historic progression. This, in return, becomes a process of reaffirming than postmodern, ideas. In these circumstances the strategies of national re-canonization stipulate the process of active forgetting, not remembering. Following this stream of thought, in this essay I emphasize the post-Nietzschean, poststructuralist thesis which states that the “(…) creation of the new, like representation, inevitably involves an act of repression”. The second part of this article deals with the practical modes of this complex process in the comparative environment of two peninsulas: Balkan and Korean. Therefore I will also discuss and interpret individual examples from both geographically and discursively diverse locations. Here, the first part of the essay is presented, and the second part will be published in the next issue of this journal.