earticle

영어

As memory has emerged as a key subject for uncovering interpretations of historical events and social practices, scholarly interest in memory and history has been increased in recent years. Collective and personal memory, especially official memory and countermemory have only recently begun to engage with feminist theoretical analyses of gender, sexuality, race, nation, and class. As part of the ongoing argument between history and memory, Asian American literature focuses on how marginalized groups attempt to maintain at the center of official memory what the dominant group would often like to forget. This paper apprpaches memory and cultural politics in the construction of Korean American woman's identity in Dictee and Comfort Woman. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Nora Okja Keller seek to further projects of empowerment and differentiation through the use of memory as a counter-discursive strategy in their texts. This cultural politics of ethnicity and gender identity in these texts unravels the many complex layers of American ethnic experience. In Dictee and Comfort Woman. the marginalized Korean American women are reconstituted as the memory-subjects by inscribing their place in hisory and by making a space to dis-place history. Historically Korean Americans, like other Asian Americans, have been materially and discursively excluded from the mainstream of the U. S. American life. Korean American women, however, are placed in a more complicated situaltion, in the sense that they not only have to struggle with trauma of colonial experiences and anti-colonial national world, but also in the new western world, they have to assimilate in order to survive. With female perspective, Cha and Keller unveil the colonized history of their homeland as well as the immigrant history of Koreans in America which has been effaced by dominated discourse. Thus Cha and Keller succeed in making available the experience of trauma from multiple perspectives and their narratives necessarily privilege individual memory as a reliable evidentiary source.