The Subaltern Speaks: Silver Stallion as the Rhetorical Space for Yanggongju

Abstract

Yanggongju, the Korean prostitutes who worked near the U.S. military camp towns during and after the Korean war, had been tabooed in the dominant discourse, except when appropriated as the symbol of the wounded nation by activists, scholars, and writers. In this historical context, Junghyo Ahn's Silver Stallion (1990) outstands because it creates the 'rhetorical space' for the subaltern Spivak finds in "Breast Giver." This paper argues that Silver Stallion is not at all a typical yanggongju novel as previous studies suggest, most importantly because the novel is written from the viewpoint, and with the voice, of the subaltern. What is revealed through this perspective is the workings of nationalism combined with patriarchism in the specific context of Korea during and after the Korean war, which we define in this paper as passive nationalism. Passive nationalism operates within a nation when the oppressor in question is formally an alley, as in the relationship between the United States and Korea. In such a case, the wounded pride of a nation is alleviated by denying the very wound, by muting yanggongju who embody the repressed memory of the nation. Silver Stallion simultaneously depicts how this particular form of nationalism operate and how yanggongju, the subaltern, speak against it. As a result, yanggongju appear in the novel as self-determined subjects who refuse to be removed from the dominant history, and multi-dimensional individuals who cannot be confined within the dichotomy of mother and whore.