The Architecture of Loss by Julia Cho: Racialized Violence of the (White) American Family

This paper traces life and death of Nora, the Korean woman, in The Architecture of Loss (2004) by Julia Cho, the play about the interracial American family, where intertextuality with Buried Child by Sam Shepard plays a key role in identifying the racial anxiety of the (white) American family. Nora’s life as a survivor of the Korean War, former sex-worker at the U.S army base, and military bride to Richard must be examined in the context of the U.S that exploited and commodified the racial other to found and build the nation. Burdened with the secret of racialized violence, the American family conforms to the white national identity and fears the racial other’s intrusion, symptomized as incest for the racial purity and familicide of the (racial) other. This ritual of reproduction of the white American family, however, condemns its members by trapping them in the mythical cycle of wrong sacrifice and failure of revitalization, lest they should accept the racial other as a change, not an intrusion.