UC Santa Barbara UC Santa Barbara Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Diasporic Ethnopoetics Through “Han-Gook”: An Inquiry into Korean American Technicians of the Enigmatic Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3zc4f1mk Author Hur, David Publication Date 2020 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Diasporic Ethnopoetics Through “Han-Gook”: An Inquiry into Korean American Technicians of the Enigmatic A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by David Hur Committee in charge: Professor Yunte Huang, co-Chair Professor Stephanie Batiste, co-Chair Professor erin Khuê Ninh Professor Sowon Park September 2020 The dissertation of David Hur is approved. ____________________________________________ erin Khuê Ninh ____________________________________________ Sowon Park ____________________________________________ Stephanie Batiste, Committee Co-Chair ____________________________________________ Yunte Huang, Committee Co-Chair September 2020 Diasporic Ethnopoetics Through “Han-Gook”: An Inquiry into Korean American Technicians of the Enigmatic Copyright © 2020 by David Hur iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This journey has been made possible with support from faculty and staff of both the Comparative Literature program and the Department of Asian American Studies. Special thanks to Catherine Nesci for providing safe passage. I would not have had the opportunities for utter trial and error without the unwavering support of my committee. Thanks to Yunte Huang, for sharing poetry in forms of life. Thanks to Stephanie Batiste, for sharing life in forms of poetry. Thanks to erin Khuê Ninh, for sharing countless virtuous lessons. And many thanks to Sowon Park, for sharing in the witnessing. Thirdly, much has been managed with a little help from the real ones. I dedicate this to my mother, my father, and my sister, for enduring and undying love of family. iv VITA OF DAVID HUR September 2020 EDUCATION Bachelor of Arts in English, Rutgers University, June 2010 (summa cum laude) Master of Arts in East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Hawai’i, Manoa, June 2012 Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature, University of California, Santa Barbara, September 2020 (expected) PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT 2013-2018: Teaching Assistant, Department of Asian American Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara AWARDS IHC Public Humanities Graduate Teaching Fellow Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2018 Graduate Research Mentorship Fellowship, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2017 FIELDS OF STUDY Asian American Literature and Culture Modern Korean Literature Global Poetic Productions v ABSTRACT Diasporic Ethnopoetics Through “Han-Gook”: An Inquiry into Korean American Technicians of the Enigmatic by David Hur This dissertation proposes an alternative reading and grouping of Korean American cultural production as diasporic ethnopoetics, and focuses on how vernacular works unfold aesthetic space for the mediation of transpacific histories and local memories. This approach does not yield to conventional limits by which Asian American works are contained and constrained as engagements with (im)positions of loss, but rather, draws out the (com)positional wordplay that is often limned by racial melancholia. Each chapter explores the work of a Korean American artist who draws out discursive space by means of modes of production that are available in each social milieu. By reading out diasporic ethnopoetics in the avant-garde cinematic poetry of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the verbal arts of Denizen Kane (né Dennis Kim), Justin Chon’s filmic text Gook, and the popular (sub)cultural stylings of Dumbfoundead (né Jonathan Park), this dissertation inquires into how each of the vi four artists negotiate and navigate discursive terrain through re-orienting play with language. The discursive terrain is significantly informed by transpacific histories, and it is by way of diaspora that each artist echolocates a Korean American identification through cultural media. Diaspora thus provides a different way of imagining relations and identifications in the present, as a present absence of relations. This dissertation also focuses on representation and language with the aim of listening to the sound play in the ethnopoetics. In this way, each chapter proposes a reading that is also a writing attuned to the work of the Korean American technicians and the space of sound that may cohere as Korean American. Put differently, this dissertation proposes a reading of select and disparate Korean American cultural production as diasporic ethnopoetics in order to listen to noises and voices channeled through representation and language. In this impossible challenge to realize the other in relation, the Korean concept of Han is an invaluable analytic for listening through the cuts of racial melancholia where language and representation may fail. Through close-reading and close-listening, this dissertation explores how each artist leads audiences to listen to channels of capacious cultural bricolage that may break with conventional understandings of language and representation. With a noticeable shift in focus from Cha’s work in the early 1980s to three Korean American male voices in the post-1992 context of the new millennium, this dissertation aims to listen to different locations in a Korean American constellation of transpacific histories for critical sound play in the colloquial Korean shorthand for the Republic of Korea: “Han-Gook.” vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface ......................................................................................................................... 1 A. Diaspora ................................................................................................ 2 B. Han ........................................................................................................ 6 C. Ethnopoetics ........................................................................................ 10 I. 詩 : “SHE becomes HER” : A Muse, A Ghoul, & Enigmatic Signifier ................ 24 A. Epigraph: Hear & the Call .................................................................. 27 B. Dictation: Hearing, the Caul ............................................................... 36 C. Transcription: Here In the Call ........................................................... 48 D. Reverse-Transcription: Hearing, the Gall ........................................... 55 II. Han Love : “Living in Sound” ............................................................................. 63 A. Check, "hana, dul" .............................................................................. 67 1. Sound & Noise ................................................................... 69 2. Feedback Loop, Fracturing ................................................ 74 B. Unfolding Resonance .......................................................................... 77 1. Twist of Melody ................................................................ 82 2. Melody of Jeong ................................................................ 83 C. Echoing Half the World in Resonance ................................................ 88 1. Breaking with, Enjambment .............................................. 91 2. Fire Burning in the Chest ................................................... 94 III. “Ain’t Nobody Watching Over Us, It’s Just Us” : Mo(u)rning in Mi-Gook ....... 97 A. The Objective, Toward Transfiguration ............................................. 99 B. Cultural Contingencies ...................................................................... 104 viii C. Language Lesson ............................................................................... 111 D. Desublimation of the Defamiliarized ................................................ 116 E. Re-membering as Utopia in Mourning .............................................. 123 IV. “BORN CTZN" ................................................................................................. 130 A. Drift of Divergence/Diversion .......................................................... 131 B. "Murals": "Mural, mural…" .............................................................. 141 C. Rhymes & Rhythms .......................................................................... 153 References ................................................................................................................ 164 ix PREFACE: 1. This dissertation is interested in interstitial spaces. On one hand, there is the transpacific, what Yunte Huang implicates as “the deadly space between,” drawing on American novelist Herman Melville’s borrowing from Scottish poet Thomas Campbell to describe “wars of discourses on the destiny of the Pacific” and “the epistemological battle between the documentary and the fictional” (4). On another hand, there is the “deathly embrace.” Sheng- mei Ma writes, “The paradox of deathly embrace [ethnic identity’s atrophy in its relation to white hegemony] brings out the love-hate relationship between Orientalism and Asian American identity, a stormy marriage with no end in sight” (xxiii). My interest here in drawing out this liberal rhyme is to move into the smoke and mirrors of language-games that produce the “counterpoetics” and “mortal kombat” in the transpacific. In the words of the hermeneut