한국연극에 재현된 디아스포라 공간과 타자성 - <해바라기의 관>과 <연변엄마>를 중심으로

Abstract

This study examines political nature of diaspora space represented in the original plays that have been performed after the 1990s which deal with the subject of diaspora. The paper attempts to examine how diaspora perception and identity are spatially produced and reproduced. Plays that have diaspora as subject tend to grant space with privileged status when expressing the loss feeling of losing homeland among the diaspora personalities and their status and context as a marginal people stuck between national people and non-national people. Diaspora space where complexity and instability of identity are reconstructed and power relationship and political nature created between the majority and minority or among the generations emerge can be linked to the space concept of Heterotopia suggested by Lefebvre and Foucault. This study analyzes diaspora perception and spatial reproduction by focusing on two dramas, <Casket of Sunflowers> and <Yeonbyeon Mother>. <Casket of Sunflowers> written by Yoo Miri who is diaspora herself expresses diaspora perception including identity division, autistic perception, and loss of homeland living outside of or on the margin of language, ethnic group, and nation by using narrative about suicide and murder of depressive main agent and reproduction of Heterotopia space. Although family break-ups take the main subject like her other plays, this play equally depicts isolation and autistic nature that Korean-Japanese feel and the isolation and feeling of loss that they receive from the homeland due to the mechanism of discrimination and exclusion that work in Japanese diaspora space. Hence, among the plays that depict Korean-Japanese, this is one of the best that deftly describes the splitting identity and unstable life of Korean-Japanese diaspora. Meanwhile, <Yeonbyeon Mother> written by Korean writer Kim Eunseong stresses that mammonism and corruption of humanity among the residents contaminate even the emigrants when reproducing diaspora space in South Korea. It takes a composition of dialogical relationship between the space of the central where governance is reproduced and the space of the marginal where Korean-Chinese diaspora live. Such spatial composition also shows production and reproduction of space where political, historical, cultural and economic factors enter, penetrate and conflict. By depicting non-nationality of diaspora who are excluded from sovereignty, law, and rights, it provokes contemplation on the outside of nation-state and critical thought on the nationalism.