earticle

영어

A Korean-American writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee (1982) is to antagonize the dominant discourses of both the Western imperialism and Asian nationalism through the use of fragmented narrative structures, multiple genres, and diverse materials. Cha focuses on the most conspicuous anti-colonial strategy, mimicry, the ironic imitation of the colonialist gesture not as a representation of the reality but as resistance as the colonialist's interpellation. In Dictee, there are three subjects who reject the colonizer's hailing as mimicry. The first subject is a colonized subject who carries out dictation by super-obedience thereby violating the premise that dictation is a sign of the authority of language to generate students as “docile bodies”. The second subject is the religious narrative which appropriates religious rituals and mocks the religious tenet that teaches that God has made us as his own likeness. Cha's mocking of Catholic dogma maximizes the contradiction of the logic of religious equivalence. The third subject who opposes the colonizer's interpellation is the narrator of Dictee who antagonizes the male dominant literary mode that prefers linear narrative. Cha violates the boundaries of the traditional genres and creates her own mode of narrative, mixing various materials such as literary, artistic, and cinematic fragments. Through this, Cha desires to rewrite the colonized's history, a history that has been suppressed, isolated, and silenced in the main historical context.