Anticommunist Representation of ‘Comfort Women’ through Multiracial Democracy in Therese Park’s A Gift of the Emperor
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In this article, I discuss the foundational value of Therese Park’s A Gift of the Emperor (1997) in an investigation of anticommunism as the shared political unconscious in Korean and Korean American literary works of the ‘comfort women’ issue. My discussion begins by reading the novel’s assimilationist representation of a U.S. anticommunist policy called multiracial democracy through its portrayal of a romantic relationship between a Korean comfort woman, Soon-ah, and a Japanese deserter-cum-American soldier, Sadamu. Then, I examine how this assimilationist representation signals the intertextual implementation of the policy and the accompanying exacerbation of Cold War amnesia of the U.S. involvement in the ‘comfort women’ issue in the other three Korean American novels―Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999), Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997), and Mary Lynn Bracht’s White Chrysanthemum (2018). I arrange these three novels in chronological order to trace their gradual intensification of the policy’s implementation and the resulting amnesia. Lastly, I compare all these four Korean American novels and their Korean counterpart, Lim Chul Woo’s Farewell Valley (2010), to critique the challenges raised by the shared anticommunist political unconscious of the two kindred groups’ literatures of comfort women.
Abstract
In this article, I discuss the foundational value of Therese Park’s A Gift of the Emperor (1997) in an investigation of anticommunism as the shared political unconscious in Korean and Korean American literary works of the ‘comfort women’ issue. My discussion begins by reading the novel’s assimilationist representation of a U.S. anticommunist policy called multiracial democracy through its portrayal of a romantic relationship between a Korean comfort woman, Soon-ah, and a Japanese deserter-cum-American soldier, Sadamu. Then, I examine how this assimilationist representation signals the intertextual implementation of the policy and the accompanying exacerbation of Cold War amnesia of the U.S. involvement in the ‘comfort women’ issue in the other three Korean American novels―Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999), Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997), and Mary Lynn Bracht’s White Chrysanthemum (2018). I arrange these three novels in chronological order to trace their gradual intensification of the policy’s implementation and the resulting amnesia. Lastly, I compare all these four Korean American novels and their Korean counterpart, Lim Chul Woo’s Farewell Valley (2010), to critique the challenges raised by the shared anticommunist political unconscious of the two kindred groups’ literatures of comfort women.
참고문헌 (21)
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