필립 칸 고탄다의『세탁』(The Wash)에 나타난 ‘사이’(in-between)의 정치성

The Politics of In-between in Philip Kan Gotanda's The Wash

Asian American literature has now been in production for over a century, and in recent decades it has shown an exponential increase in its publication, too. At the same time, with the heated pace of publication of Asian American writing expanded beyond their own Asian race and their national borders, Asian American literature is even referred to not only the projection of their native national identities but also as a cultural production. Philip Kan Gotanda(1951- ), a Sansei Japanese American dramatist, problematizes the categories of race and the matters of ethnicity and continues to produce works for screen and stage. The characters Gotanda portrays are mainly seen as representatives of Asian Americans as a group and they are selfconscious of the representation. As a Sansei writer, he recollects the past memory of his ascendants. However, he recognizes such diasporic experience is not confined to the concept of essence or purity, but transformed the cognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity in living, and the conception of identity which lives with and through difference and hybridity. The Wash adopts traditional Asian American family drama form but the Japanese American family is in danger of being collapsed from the start of the play. Nobu's family gradually gets out of the stable Oedipus family structure and enters into "in-between" space, toward the new anti-Oedipus space. Especially, Masi, Nobu's wife, is first portrayed as the repressed female character but she decides to retrieve the purloined sexual politics from her house internally and from the outside world externally. In this context, Masi's seeking a divorce is Gotanda's strategy to move beyond the disruptive and indeterminate ＂between" toward a new politics. The conflicts between driving forces of Oedipus and anti-Oedipus in Nobu's family reflect Gotanda's desire for deterritorializing Oedipus not only from traditional Asian American family values but also from Asian American stereotype. In conclusion, Gotanda's new version of Asian American family drama reveals changed currents as each moment they become new social subjects from getting out of the state of diasporic being. Masi, represented as one of the repressed Asian Americans, gets out of the fixed social norm of American society and can get a newly-born social identity. Hence, the in-between politics Masi performs places Japanese American into the position of speaking for themselves on stage.