Diasporic Ethnopoetics Through “Han-Gook”: An Inquiry into Korean American Technicians of the Enigmatic

This dissertation proposes an alternative reading and grouping of Korean American cultural production as diasporic ethnopoetics, and focuses on how vernacular works unfold aesthetic space for the mediation of transpacific histories and local memories. This approach does not yield to conventional limits by which Asian American works are contained and constrained as engagements with (im)positions of loss, but rather, draws out the (com)positional wordplay that is often limned by racial melancholia. Each chapter explores the work of a Korean American artist who draws out discursive space by means of modes of production that are available in each social milieu. By reading out diasporic ethnopoetics in the avant-garde cinematic poetry of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the verbal arts of Denizen Kane (né Dennis Kim), Justin Chon’s filmic text Gook, and the popular (sub)cultural stylings of Dumbfoundead (né Jonathan Park), this dissertation inquires into how each of the four artists negotiate and navigate discursive terrain through re-orienting play with language. The discursive terrain is significantly informed by transpacific histories, and it is by way of diaspora that each artist echolocates a Korean American identification through cultural media. Diaspora thus provides a different way of imagining relations and identifications in the present, as a present absence of relations. This dissertation also focuses on representation and language with the aim of listening to the sound play in the ethnopoetics. In this way, each chapter proposes a reading that is also a writing attuned to the work of the Korean American technicians and the space of sound that may cohere as Korean American. Put differently, this dissertation proposes a reading of select and disparate Korean American cultural production as diasporic ethnopoetics in order to listen to noises and voices channeled through representation and language. In this impossible challenge to realize the other in relation, the Korean concept of Han is an invaluable analytic for listening through the cuts of racial melancholia where language and representation may fail. Through close-reading and close-listening, this dissertation explores how each artist leads audiences to listen to channels of capacious cultural bricolage that may break with conventional understandings of language and representation. With a noticeable shift in focus from Cha’s work in the early 1980s to three Korean American male voices in the post-1992 context of the new millennium, this dissertation aims to listen to different locations in a Korean American constellation of transpacific histories for critical sound play in the colloquial Korean shorthand for the Republic of Korea: “Han-Gook.