I, too, sing America: Individualism and transnational constructions of American identity in Korean American literature

This dissertation argues that Korean American literature offers a challenge to the theoretical assumptions with which critics have approached the histories of Asian American literatures. The paradigms typically associated with Asian American literatures fail to account for the trajectory of Korean American literature. Rather than focusing on conflicts related to communal experience and ethnic traditions, Korean American writers actively explore the dynamics of American citizenship through the category of the individual and the concept of transnationalism. Less preoccupied than their Chinese American and Japanese American counterparts with the question of the "dual personality," Korean American writers have investigated the gaps between legal citizenship and cultural citizenship in the construction of American identity.; One of the abiding questions for many Korean American works is how the concept of transnational citizenship can allow one to negotiate between legal citizenship and cultural citizenship to realize a fully "American" identity. In the writings of Gary Pak, Heinz Insu Fenkl, Chang-Rae Lee, and Don Lee, transnationalism becomes liberating because it enables non-white Americans to escape the binary of the hyphen in which ethnic identity and American national identity are set up falsely as competing identities. Further, transnationalism becomes an effective strategy for responding to what I call the racialization of ethnicity, a totalizing ideological mechanism through which ethnic identity is essentialized and inscribed on the body and different Asian ethnic groups are subsumed into a single "race," and the individual is thus elided twice. By restoring status and agency to the individual, these Korean American writers dramatize ways in which racially marked Americans can both respond to racism and escape the binary of the hyphen. Ultimately, I argue, Korean American literature places itself firmly within the American tradition of self-making, even as it seeks to expand our understanding of the different ways in which American selves can be made.