『제스처 인생』에 나타난 초민족적 정체성 구성에 대한 연구

Abstract

As globalization of the world extends wider and becomes faster around the globe, the legal/illegal migration of people from peripheries to metropolises is enormously increasing. Peoples from the Third World try to move into metropolitan areas to find out more opportunities to get jobs and education despite of higher barriers of national borders. While the encounter between different cultures, languages occurs more often, the need to prepare to conceive differences without prejudice is growing. In the mean time, many of minorities from the Third World feel so difficult and confused to adjust and assimilate to metropolitan dominant cultures that they can not give up their own languages and cultures and transform their ethnic/national identities rapidly and easily. In this writing, I will explore the possibilities of forming transnational identities to minorities by studying the theories about constantly changing identity construction of postcolonial world and reading a novel by Korean American writer. In Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Franklin Kurohata has lived in an affluent suburban area called Bedley Run as a Japanese American concealing his Korean origin. Since Hata is widely known as an example of good citizen in town, most neighbors call him Doc Hata and welcome him. As he ran Sunny Medical supply, everybody called him Doc. Since Hata settled down in this town, he has been willing to assimilate to white dominant culture. As he always tries to identify him with white people, it seems that he succeeds to assimilate to white culture. But in the depth of his subconsciousness there has been the trauma after the Pacific War related to the memory of Kkutaeh, a Korean sex slave(a comfort woman). In his own story Hata presents Kkutaeh as his beloved, an imposed sex slave by combined demand of Japanese imperial army and the patriarchal system in Joseon Dynasty based on Confucianism. The memory of Kkutaeh's tragic death in Hata's mind often appears as a ghost and disturbs him in identification with dominant white culture. Sunny, Hata's adopted daughter from Korea conflicts with Hata's patriarchal authority and hypocrisy to white society and finally makes him realize how to make true relationships with people around him and how to construct appropriate transnational identity in the age of globalization.