『동양인 서양에 가다』에 나타난 디아스포라 주체

Diasporic Subject in East Goes West

This paper presents chungpa Han, the protagonist of East Goes West, as a diasporic subject who is challenging the rigid notions of nation, nationalism, and racial identity during the 1920s and 1930s in America. Arguing against the previous assumption that Han (as well as the novelist himself) is a successfully assimilated 'oriental yankee’ into mainstream American society, this paper explores a framework for thinking about how Han's complex, ambivalent, and even contradicting behaviors turned out to be not only an acute sense of survival but also a shrewd tactics employed to trick the America's dominant ideology, Orientalism. Building on Stewart Hall, Paul Gilroy and Lisa Lowe's theorization on the understanding of cultural/diasporic identities which are constantly changing and transforming into new ones, the paper features Chungpa Han's diasporic subjectivity that is marked by heterogeneity, hybridity and complexity. As a diasporic subject， Han is constantly transgressing the dichotomous boundaries of East/West, home country/host country, and colonizer/colonized. Han's ability to cross different cultures and nations makes it possible for him to be a ’graft' that connects heterogenous bodies together. Through this graft, he aims to engender a ’hybrid flowering’ that has never been seen before in either East or West