earticle

영어

This paper examines Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt focusing on its possibility as a resistant text to power relations. She creates Binh, a Vietnamese homosexual cook, who is working at GertrudeStein’s salon house in Paris in the late 1920s and the early 1930s. He is the ‘Other,’ experiencing alienation and exclusion, and silenced and appropriated by the ‘Self,’ in various power relations such as colonialism, orientalism, racialization, heterosexuality, and discourse control. But Truong gives him extraordinary insight which penetrates the nature of power relations. She also provides him with a fluent inner voice which illustrates his sharp criticism of the power relations and the ‘Self.’ Further, Binh demonstrates his capability of powerful resistance and subversion by breaking the binarisms of the ‘Self’/the ‘Other, superior/inferior, civilized/savage, intelligent/foolish, sacred/contaminated, and sexually pure/ sexually aberrant. Truong lets Binh, a subaltern of color, not only ‘speak’ but also ‘reappropriate’ and ‘rewrite’ his life and story, stolen by the ‘Self.’ Truong establishes the possibility of border-crossing diaspora and its values, such as fluidity, openness, both/and, neither/nor, and hybridity, as an alternative world view and identity. Thus Truong creates a kind of counter-narrative, showing postmodern, postcolonial, and cosmopolitan traits in the novel.