ABSTRACT
This xenophobic slur has always puzzled me in its facile command to some magical retraction across great distances and lengthy separations. Bearing the double-edged implications of (once and future) belonging and of (present) repudiation for the immigrant subject, the concept-word-space “home” thus invoked holds out additional paradoxes for those whose gender, sexual, and class positionings would have precluded any secure, comfortable habitation in the first place. This essay attempts to track such awkward movements through four cultural productions by Korean immigrant women: Myung Mi Kim's poetry volume, Under Flag, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's book DICTEE, and multimedia piece EXILÉE, and Kim Su Theiler's film Great Girl. These works map a knotted topography of Korean-American imbrications that contest any neat temporal or spatial distinctions. By looking at the representational strategies by which they remember and imagine “Korea,” I seek to foreground recurring tensions between an expressed desire for this “home” and an historically sobered acknowledgment of its manifold inaccessibility. The quotation marks around the two words are deployed to signify their multiple enfigurations as objects of memory, yearning, and imaginary projection, as well as a specific geographical location with a unique history of colonial dominations, internal conflicts, and transnational migrations. 1
