환대와 지구적 상상력: 2000년대 다문화주의 시를 중심으로

Abstract

Traditional communities in the world are now changing into multiethnic societies. Different identities are competing against each another even in peripheral communities. Korean society is also facing a new problem of redefining itself for its future, particularly because multiethnic phenomena are rapidly being foregrounded in this traditional society, which has long been uniquely considered homogeneous racially and culturally. In this context of redefining identities, multiculturalism and postmodernist discourses have been suggested. Multiculturalism and post-discourses as theoretical concepts for new identities, however, have fundamental limits because they cannot imagine beyond the boundaries of the human. If we keep ourselves within the concepts related to modern industrial capitalism, we will face greater unprecedented disasters: climatic changes, exhaustion of fossil fuels, and shortages of food resources. These issues cannot be resolved by attempts to redefine and reestablish relationships in and among the members of the human: it requires a new imagination which can think beyond the anthropocentric one. This study analyzes several concepts of modern subjectivity and the other and, through a reading of multiculturalist poems produced in the 2000s, will suggest an alternative species of imagination that can overcome the negative effects of the Western modern/ity on modern worlds. This paper particularly suggests a turning inside-out of the concept of empathy and personification, the two major literary devices used in modern anthropocentric prosody. Literary imagination can be defined as the ability to understand the pains of the other. This paper focuses on the interdependencies of the inter-subjective　individuals and expands the concept of the other so that it includes the land/Earth, the human, and the life itself. This study will reintroduce traditional daily rituals of ‘friendship and hospitality’ as an alternative imagination to overcome the Western morden/ity. A new ‘global imagination’ based on friendship and hospitality will let us rediscover the worth of the land by extending the concept of the other beyond the realm of traditional one/other. It is also a way of retaining the ‘ancient futures’ that will create a new relationship among the land, the human, and the Earth itself. We find hints of this new ‘global imagination’ in the multiculturalist Korean poetry of the 2000s.