Diasporan Subjectivity and Cultural Space in Korean American Picture Books

The "Third Wave" of Korean Immigration to the United States, following the liberalizing of National Quotas under the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, was characterized by a significant shift in the migrant profile, in that families immigrated as well as individuals,¹ and this pattern has continued. Consequently, the literature produced by (and about) members of the Korean diaspora in the United States began to give expression to the experience of children as part of a diasporan community, and has done so particularly through the medium of picture books. Diaspora involves not only movement across national borders, but also the experience of crossing boundaries of race, culture, language, history, space, and time. Because identity is conceptualized as a communicative process, for a people living in diaspora there arises a complex and ambivalent process of defining and articulating identity. A function of picture books for children, as with other kinds of literary production, is to constitute social and cultural identities by addressing the challenge to resignify established assumptions and meanings of identity. Characteristically in these works, neither the United States nor Korea is allowed to function as the singular locality of identity formation, although there is significant tension between the impulse, on the one hand, to assimilate difference to universality and, on the other, to emphasize the social imaginary of inherited cultural tradition and social identity.

Picture books are potentially a powerful medium for dealing with displacement and diaspora, in that they incorporate both verbal communication and physical, visual orientations in space. This combination enables them to engage directly with verbal and visual discourses of place as a source of identity, and hence the functions of place in representations of displacement and loss of subjectivity. As Dalia Kandioti pertinently argues, "The nature of places (of origin or dispersal) is crucial to studies of displacement and transition, for the migrant . . . [has] to negotiate new ways of being in concrete spaces with specific attributes."² The centrality of place to cultural understanding is further summed up in Edward S. Casey's observation, "Given that culture manifestly exists, it must exist somewhere, and it exists more concretely and completely in places than in minds or signs."³ Further, the bodies that inhabit culture enact cultural practices by "incorporation, habituation, and expression."⁴ Children's picture books, by virtue of their dual coding as verbal narrative and visual evocation of situated culture, are apt to pivot on a core emotional tension between the drive toward self-understanding and the understanding of one's relationship with the external world. Those books which deal with cultural displacement depict this tension in an acute form, since the child characters in such books are normally of an age at which children are too young to attain a self-reflective consciousness and thence a rational understanding of the experience of displacement. The process characteristically pursued is thus one whereby emotional tension and reconciliation form a pathway to reconstituted subjectivity and an intuitive understanding of something about the self. The visual manipulation of represented space, as distinct from depictions of place, plays a key role in communicating emotional understandings which underpin the often quite simple cerebral understanding offered by verbal text. Space thus functions as trope, so that hard-to-express abstract concepts are linked to the physical world, and hence a correspondence is established between the physical world and the mental processes of characters and audiences.

Ideologically, picture books concerned in some way with crossing cultural boundaries are inevitably embroiled in complex issues pertaining to the relationship between subjectivity and multiculturalism, and to the vexed questions around the possibilities of hybridity. Hence a narrative structure involving the loss and reclaiming of subjectivity turns out to be deeply implicated in the common metanarrative of multiculturalism, especially the ameliorative or positive versions of this metanarrative that prevail in children's literature: a multicultural metanarrative becomes...