ORCID Identifier(s)

0000-0001-6006-4039

Graduation Semester and Year

2022

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in English

Department

English

First Advisor

Timothy R. Morris

Abstract

The question of modernity has been widely debated in postcolonial studies, with scholars such as Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo arguing that the emergence of alternate modernities unsettles the West as a cultural metropole. Dussel and Mignolo argue that the dominant narrative of modernity is rooted in Western colonialism, which situates the West as a cultural center. Thus, dominant modern ideology associates the height of human progress with Eurocentric culture. Transmodernity, according to Dussel, is a theory that focuses on the emergence of other modernities in the waning of Western colonization or influence. However, studies in transmodernity have not adequately addressed the issue of East Asian modernities. My dissertation addresses the issue of East Asian modernities with special attention to transmodernity. The notion of the translocal describes transmodern expressions of space and time. Transmodernity is characterized by cultural pluralism. Translocality, likewise, is characterized by temporal or spatial pluralisms. Dominant modern ideology conceives of time as strictly linear and of space in terms of a metropole (the West), the heart of civilization, and outlying colonies (the non-West), places to be civilized. Asian gothic literary expressions, abundant in both Asian and Asian-American literatures, may be characterized as translocal because Asian gothic expressions pose the collapse of boundaries between two separate realms signifying separation between the world of the living and that of the dead. Asian gothic expressions often emerge as directives to absolve injustice suffered by departed ancestors. Korea’s colonial history informs these gothic qualities in Korean and Korean American literary texts. Due to the close relationship between coloniality in Asia and the contemporary character of the Asian gothic, I focus on literature of the Korean diaspora due to its insights into coloniality/modernity, finding the historical memory of Japan’s colonization of Korea important to these texts. Literary flows and emerging analogous issues between Korea, Japan, and China attest to the longstanding history of literary exchange between these countries and shed further insight into the relationship between the Asian gothic and transmodernity outside of Korean diaspora literature. In Chapter One, the spectral in Younghill Kang’s East Goes West and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée demonstrates the resurgence of Asian cultural qualities repressed by modernity. In Chapter Two, Japanese and Korean gothic comics use Western history and culture as an imaginative space to reinvent qualities and identities existing prior to modernization. In Chapter Three, the presence of urban decay and waste in Korean short stories and Pingwa Jia’s Happy Dreams defies a dominant modern narrative by affirming cyclical and/or spiritual presences in urban environments. Chapter Four demonstrates that collectivistic beliefs simmer just beneath the surface of a capitalist, rapidly urbanized society in Korean short stories and Kyung-sook Shin’s I’ll Be Right There. In the conclusion of the dissertation, I consider how the supernatural indicates emerging modernities in a contemporary Chinese drama series, The Untamed. I argue that where there is “strangeness” in contemporary Asian and Asian-American literary texts—hauntings, moments out of time or place, all-consuming obsessive or compulsive desires—new ideas are being generated about modernity. These various expressions of the gothic in Asian and Asian American literary texts challenge the status quo of the dominant modernity. Ghostliness acknowledges conditions of otherness that represent evolving identities for those outside of the majority. These representations demonstrate alternative modernities capable of articulating racism and the struggle for self-acceptance for those classified as other by the mainstream. The strangeness of ghosts, shadows, or uncanniness in these texts suggests where new ideas about modernity are being generated. In other words, while the Asian gothic ultimately expresses the crossover or mingling between the distinct realms of the living and the dead, these realms are identified in contemporary texts in terms of the dominant modern worldview and that which has been excluded from the dominant modern worldview.

Keywords

East Asian literatures, East Asian modernities

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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