UC Riverside

Since the mid-1990s, Korean American writers have written novels to double-voice Korean/Asian American issues by a detour through the Japanese Imperial Army’s sexual slavery (the ‘comfort women’ issue) during World War II. Unfortunately, their double-voicing forgets the U.S. Cold War involvement in the issue, leading to American nationalist representations of it. Such discursive acts metonymically reinforce Korean/Asian American national subjecthood. The following chapters are divided into three parts to embody this gradual amnesia and the resultant increase in their Korean/Asian “American” legibility through the disappearing slash in the parts’ titles. Part I, “Claiming Korea(n)/America,” consists of Chapter 1, “Anticommunist Nationalizing ‘Comfort Women’ through Multiracial Democracy in Therese Park’s A Gift of the Emperor.” I examine why the novel’s critical representation of Japan’s colonial rule of Korea, the U.S. detention and mobilization of Japanese Americans, and Syngman Rhee’s anticommunism rather indicates its assimilation into a U.S. anticommunist foreign policy called multiracial democracy that intended to propagandize the U.S.-led panethnic anticommunist collectivity in Asia. Part II, “Claiming Korean America,” has two chapters. In Chapter 2, “Americanizing ‘Comfort Women’ through the Homogenization of Nationalisms in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life,” I critique the novel’s homogenization, whose American imperialist logic starts to forget the U.S. involvement in the continuity between the ‘comfort women’ issue and U.S. military-centered prostitution while remembering the Cold War origin of the model minority myth. Chapter 3, “Korean/Americanizing ‘Comfort Women’ through Transparent Translation in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman,” debunks the novel’s attribution of the shared gender and ethnic affinities as the reason for a transparent translation, which dialectically Orientalizes both a comfort woman and Korean American woman due to their sharing of Asianness. The last chapter, “Cold War Nationalizing ‘Comfort Women’ through the Universalization of Women’s Oppression in Mary Lynn Bracht’s White Chrysanthemum,” is located in Part III, “Claiming Korea.” I investigate the novel’s discursive link between Japan’s military sexual slavery and the Jeju 4.3 (April 3) Incident, whose gender-essentialist emphasis on women’s economic and thus sexual empowerment against universal patriarchy in the domestic realm is metaphorically reminiscent of a U.S. anticommunist policy called domestic containment.