earticle

영어

The Korean American adoptee poets Sun Yung Shin in Skirt Full of Black and Jennifer Kwon Dobbs in Paper Pavilion create “intertexts” through a disruptive textual biopolitics as defined by Hardt and Negri in Commonwealth; Kristevan intertextuality helps illuminate the ways in which the biopolitics is enacted in the poetry. The poetry challenges administrative textualities that document and produce the orphan and the adoptee. Those documents of biopower and their accompanying narratives are normative textualities that regularize (or regulate) the adoptive situation. Because the texts that create orphans and adoptees are often incomplete and/or inaccurate, the space in which the adoptee himself or herself existed is often untexted. This untexted space is a subaltern space. Dobbs and Shin occupy and speak from that space in an oppositional intertextuality, a biopolitical poetics that fragments and disrupts normative textualities, recalling Kristeva’s original formulation of intertextuality as “transposition.” In affinal intertextualities the poets help to create a “commons” through resonance between the two volumes and into discourses that include the larger transnational adoptive and Asian American communities. Shin and Dobbs write as part of the disruptive multitude. Their poems model resistant writing, helping create a commons that, to adapt Eleana Kim’s phrase, contributes to a biopolitics of belonging.