엘리자베스 김의『만 가지 슬픔』에 나타난 혼혈입양인의 국가적·인종적 비체화

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the national and racial abjection and re-colonialization on the mixed racial adoptee in Ten Thousand Sorrows. I read the body of the mixed-race adoptee as the metaphor which stands for Korea’s recolonial condition after the Korean War and signals the failure of the American state to make room in the national family for the racialized figure of difference. I also read Kim’s work as the account not only to destroy Korean narrative of patriarchal nationalism but also to reveal the failure of American benevolence. The story of the international adoptee represented in Kim’s memoir is intertwined with Korean history and shows the overlapping trauma of Korean war, American neocolonialism and entry of the racialized body into American hegemony. The theoretical basis of my argument is Kristeva’s feministic psychoanalysis, in particular, her notion of abjection. In analyzing Elizabeth Kim’s Ten Thousand Sorrows I also use Kriesteva’notion of abject in connection with the body of the mixed blood Korean and I put Kim’s position in the paradigm of’abjection’ to reveal Kim’s unstable identity in Korean and American society. Kim exists as an abject child in her mother country, Korea, because of her mixed blood body and was expelled,excluded, rejected and repressed to preserve the nation’s racial purity and patriarchal culture. Kim also exists as an abject child in her adopted country,the United States, because of her racialized body different from white Americans and she is reconlonized there.