초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Andreas Huyssen indicates that a new network of memories, causing tension and conflicts with the mainstream memory, enables us to reconsider the essence of national identity, reinforced by the mainstream memory. Extending his idea, the study of this essay is to discuss the way in which Kingston uses Chinese Americans’ historical memory to raise social, racial, multicuitural and political issues in defining their positionality in American society. Depicting BaBa’s individual experience in the United States, she reveals how BaBa’s traumatic memory in which he has had through immigration experience unstabilized his present self-identity. She, however, attempts to relocate him within a firm and stable subject as American through reinterpreting his traumatic memory. Kingston refuses the mainstream memory as determined, for the memory fails to fully represent the traumatic memory of how and why Chinese immigrants have suffered irrational and violent immigration laws and racialized social norms against such the ethnic others. Kingston aims to reveal such harsh and irrational laws and norms have psychologically and physically traumatized Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans between America and China. Nevertheless, she seeks a possibility of overcoming such situations in the modes of multicultural American society by stressing that BaBa can be placed in a subject who writes his own individual history as American in American historical context with her deep sympathy.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
memory, ethnic others, positionality, identity, immigration laws, history, racialized social norms, multicultural American society
