UCLA

My dissertation looks at narratives that capture the mobility of Korean language and culture in Latin American contexts. It addresses a wide range of materials in Korean, Spanish, Japanese, and Portuguese, including: literary magazines published by Korean minority writers’ groups in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay; documentary films by directors who self-identify as 1.5 generation immigrants; and novels and autobiographical essays published and circulated across South Korea, the Southern Cone region of South America, and the U.S. in the twentieth century. In examining texts that are by definition cross-national and cross-lingual and in which languages, literary traditions, and media cultures congregate, my work acknowledges and challenges the exclusionary processes that shape human consciousness and knowledge.Conventional literary epistemology considers the border-crossing narrative as an "atypical" case that conflicts with the authority of the nation-state as a measuring unit for language, literature, and culture. Yet what I am calling hyphenated literature has far greater potential when read outside the still-dominant monolingual-monocultural paradigm that frames and limits literary texts by insisting on an overlap between geographic, ethnic, and lingual origins. By rethinking how "atypicality" is managed in literary interpretation and history, and questioning how "inherently different" bodies, objects, and ideas are dealt with in existing classificatory systems, my work proposes moving beyond this paradigm. In my reading, hyphenated literature deconstructs conventional literary forms, giving us footing to critique current disciplinary approaches on non-canonical or marginalized narratives and to rethink the diversity inherent in the language of literature. With this approach, I reframe literature as a complex site for the articulation of a politicized positionality and agency rather than an evidentiary document used for the indication or substantiation of ethnic-lingual-cultural homogeneity.