engleski

Yellow Perils and Speech Monsters: Language, Ethnicity and Power between Mama America and Mama Korea

This study primarily addresses immigrants’ perspectives and examines the identity struggle of second generation Korean-Americans in a Cosmopolitan New York setting. On the theoretical level, this essay demonstrates that cosmopolitanism’ s multi-dimensionality makes it a useful tool in grasping writers’ relation to cultural patrimony, as well as to gender, identity, and (geo)national politics. Taking into account the distinct histories of cultural studies in the United States, their relation to different immigrant nations, as well as the range of positive and negative nuances the terms globalism and localism have in both World and American literature and culture, in my essay I consider the concepts’ continuities and limits both synchronically and diachronically. My employment of globalism/cosmopolitanism in the analysis of Chang Rae-lee’ s novel Native Speaker offers a case study of exile, intersubjectivity, and self-fashioning that related terms, namely, hybridity and globalism, are incapable of addressing. Toward the end of my essay I leave the realm of discourse analysis and look at Chang Rae-lee’ s position as a cultural critic. He achieves that role by casting himself as both local and cosmopolitan in order to secure his place within constricting versions of national culture and to enable the disruption of those existing constructions through his ‘ marginal’ narratives of ethnic and national identity.

language; ethnicity; power

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