Korean American literature : literary orphans and the legacy of Han
In this dissertation, I explore how history creates postcolonial shadows that linger over Korean American writers of the first and second generations. These shadows, I argue, converge in the trope of the orphan, which along with signaling Korea's colonial past, also signals the failure of the American state to make room in the national family for the racialized figure of difference. I argue that a diaspora model, more than a postcolonial or minority discourse model, allows us to examine how colonial identity lingers beyond a postcolonial paradigm, travels (though not unchanged) across generations and oceans, and is then renegotiated by new disciplining structures which are, at the same time, implicated within colonial identity
Thesis, Dissertation, English, 2008