한흑구 소설에 나타난 1930년대 조선인 미국 유학생과 모빌리티

Abstract

This article focuses on Han Heuk-Gu's novels depicting Korean American students in the 1930s and examines the ways in which mobility changes in these novels are intertwined with Han's perceptions of the Korean diaspora. The ability to move varies based on factors such as class, race, and gender, with mobility management serving as a criterion for distinguishing between citizens and non-citizens. While citizens under the aegis of the state are guaranteed the right to free movement, non-citizens are deprived of this right through deportation, isolation, and imprisonment. The ability to move is closely tied to power and functions as one of the criteria that distinguishes the subject from the other. <Twilight Rain> highlights the ways in which the mobility of non-citizens in 1930s American society, the Koreans, is transformed by racism. The mobility of a Korean college student is stripped away when he violates the salt of the earth between him and blacks, the dominant racist norms of white society. Once able to drive a car to get between the city and the farm, he is now forced to get out of the car and walk on the highway, where he is not free from the risk of car accidents. However, <Twilight Rain> does not stop at depicting the helpless Koreans who are controlled by racism; it exposes the fact that Han's real-life romance with an international Korean student was with a white woman, not a black woman, exposing the falsity of American society's racism to protect the pure white race. Meanwhile, Han Heuk-Gu attempted to adapt <Young artist> in the 1960s from <Some Young artist>, published in the 1930s, and the mobility experienced by international students in the two works shows a huge gap. Whereas the Korean students in <Some Young artist> are non-citizens of American society with limited mobility, the Korean students in <Young artist> have free access to the city's mobility infrastructure and see themselves as part of the human march in New York, the universal city of the world. This change is connected to the change in self-perception that led to the South's establishment as an independent nation-state after the Korean War, and the mobility represented in Han's novels is connected to the possibility of a modern nation-state, and becomes one of the main frameworks for interpreting the change in perception of South Korean society through colonial Korea and liberation.