Islamic Butcher Shop by Son Hong-gyu Read through the Diasporic Imagination

In recent Korean literature, various phenomena in the twenty-first century Korean society call for literary proposition called multiculture. If we define multicultural fiction as an embodiment of life that ensues from the relationship between the residents and the figures who moved in from overseas, a tour de force by far in featuring foreign characters in Korean fiction would be Islamic Butcher Shop by Son Hong-gyu. The novel successfully addresses the ‘diasporic imagination’ in a way that other Korean novels claiming to represent multiculturalism have been unable to so far. The novel can be an example demonstrating how to overcome the asymmetry between the subject and the ‘other’. By moving beyond the question ‘What is your origin?’, it showcases the way diasporic imagination unfolds itself.