Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofAsian American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Early Forms of Expression to the Start of the Twentieth Century
- Part II The Exclusion Era, World War II, and the Immediate Postwar Era
- 5 Indian Diasporic Autobiography: New Nations and New Selves
- 6 Koreans in Exile: Younghill Kang and Richard E. Kim
- 7 Filipino and Filipina Voices
- 8 Chinatown Life as Contested Terrain: H. T. Tsiang, Jade Snow Wong, and C. Y. Lee
- 9 Coded Critiques: Japanese American Incarceration Literature
- 10 Asian American Short Fiction and the Contingencies of Form, 1930s–1960s
- 11 The Chicago School and the Sociological Imagination
- Part III The Asian American Movement
- Part IV Canons
- Part V Post-1965 and the Twenty-First Century
- Part VI Twenty-First Century: 9/11, Empire, and Other Challenges to Literature
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Koreans in Exile: Younghill Kang and Richard E. Kim
from Part II - The Exclusion Era, World War II, and the Immediate Postwar Era
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2015
Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofAsian American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Early Forms of Expression to the Start of the Twentieth Century
- Part II The Exclusion Era, World War II, and the Immediate Postwar Era
- 5 Indian Diasporic Autobiography: New Nations and New Selves
- 6 Koreans in Exile: Younghill Kang and Richard E. Kim
- 7 Filipino and Filipina Voices
- 8 Chinatown Life as Contested Terrain: H. T. Tsiang, Jade Snow Wong, and C. Y. Lee
- 9 Coded Critiques: Japanese American Incarceration Literature
- 10 Asian American Short Fiction and the Contingencies of Form, 1930s–1960s
- 11 The Chicago School and the Sociological Imagination
- Part III The Asian American Movement
- Part IV Canons
- Part V Post-1965 and the Twenty-First Century
- Part VI Twenty-First Century: 9/11, Empire, and Other Challenges to Literature
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter talks about two most prominent early Korean/American writers, Younghill Kang and Richard Eun-kook Kim. Kang made numerous attempts to become naturalized as a US citizen, including separate special bills introduced specifically on his behalf in the US House of Representative and Senate in 1939. One of the historiographic virtues of Kang's work is that both Korea and the United States, from the perspective of an exile, become heterotopic spaces, meta-sites of otherness that reveal the underlying values and desires that animate them. Fiction for both writers involved not only presenting a foreign culture to an American audience but also narrating the various complexities of intercultural exchange. For Kang and Kim, it is specifically the geopolitical changes inaugurated by emergent and resurgent American-century imperialism and hegemony in myriad forms that forge new alliances and partnerships that flower into happy marriages or falter into disconcerting proximities and competing interests.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature , pp. 123 - 138Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015