Abstract
In her article "The Narration of Transnational Territory in Kingston's China Men and Kim's 검은 꽃 (Black Flower)" Ju Young Jin analyzes Maxine Hong Kingston's and Young-Ha Kim's novels both of which feature East Asian indentured workers in the U.S. and Mexico, respectively. Jin traces the way in which the transnational subjects in the two novels create a textual territory by displacing national histories in a period that has witnessed an increase in indentured workers from East Asia to American continents. Kim creates an apocryphal history of the Korean presence in the New World reimagining the forgotten past by interweaving actual historical facts and Kingston narrates the story of Chinese indentured workers who inaugurate a new cultural tradition in their exiled land to make it their home. Both writers narrate displacement, which Jin reads as "deterritorialization" (Deleuze and Guattari) in order to ground their protagonists in a new space unbound by national territories. For Kingston and Kim creating textual territory is tantamount to legitimation of their own views of literature and the history of immigration in the U.S.
Recommended Citation
Jin, Ju Young
"The Narration of Transnational Territory in Kingston's China Men and Kim's 검은 꽃 (Black Flower)."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
15.2
(2013):
<https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2222>
This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field.
The above text, published by Purdue University Press ©Purdue University, has been downloaded 667 times as of 03/26/24.
Included in
American Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Education Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Reading and Language Commons, Rhetoric and Composition Commons, Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons, Television Commons, Theatre and Performance Studies Commons