Han and Trauma: the Inheritance of Violence in Korean American Literature

Abstract

This paper examines how Korean American women writers have represented the experience and inheritance of violence and nationhood. Focusing on two writers, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Cathy Park Hong, the analysis sheds light on the strategies they have implemented to depict trauma. This illuminates questions of memory and historiography as they pertain specifically to Korean American women. These writers center the experiences of Korean women who are exiled or refugees within texts that mimic the process of memorial excavation and highlight its lacunas, uncertainties, and dead ends. Using Seo-Young Chu’s concept of postmemory han, I expose the ambivalence of the Korean American woman towards both national spheres composing her identity. The resistance to assimilation and erasure, on the one hand, and the impossibility of a univocal representation of the homeland, on the other, lead these female subjects to actualize their transgressive potential by acquiring a distinct transnational posture and thus disrupting the nation-self continuum.