아방가르드 인종 코미디: 영진 리의 『용비어천가』

The current cross-national, cross racial, and cross cultural environment influences today’s new subjectivity formations. Such newly-created transnational subjects are even difficult to be classified as Asian American, as racial or national borders fall apart. In this context, this paper examines the work of Asian American woman playwright Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven. Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven employs frames of both stand-up and sketch comedies and exaggerates the representation of stereotypes against Korean Americans, Koreans, and white male Americans. Laughs generated by Bertolt Brecht’s “alienation effect” and conceptualized with a Sianne Ngai’s litery term, “ugly feeling” constantly lead the cosmopolitan audience to engage with the issues of race, gender, and ethnicity. The main plots of the play are two; one is the Artaud-like theater of cruelty where Korean women and a Korean-American woman show macho behaviors and another is the Brechtian epic theater where a white couple continues to find the meaning of their relationship. The two different plots do not interfere with each plot, but show all the characters try to expose their inner selves to the world and to stand up to a lot of suppression of minorities and of feminity they have experienced so far. Thus, a Young Jean Lee’s new version of racial comedy presents one stage where Koreans, Korean Americans, and white Americans can stand free as transnational.