“New Town is without image”: Representations of Enclaves in Cathy Park Hong’s Poetry

Abstract

This paper examines the manifestation of enclaves in the work of Korean American poet Cathy Park Hong, in order to study how the Korean immigrant experience shapes the representation of selfhood and nationhood. The Korean experience of nationhood rests on unstable national formations, where the enclave plays a dual role of inclusion and exclusion, to which the self and the community both resort so as to assert their existence. We will highlight the ways in which the trope of the enclave in Hong’s poetry is used and interrogated both as a motif derived from Korean American experience and as a tool to address dynamics of marginalization and identity formation on the national level and in the literary community.