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Cartographies of Silence: Language and Nation in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée In this chapter, I focus on the theme of silence in relation to the work of Korean American woman writer, artist, and filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. When I suggest a critical analysis of silence, in relation to Cha’s work, what I mean is a reading of “silence” from at least two theoretical positions. First, I question the silencing of Cha’s life and work within U.S. culture, especially in the context of a greater silence and invisibility surrounding the history and writings of Asian Americans, in particular Asia American women. Second, I look to the silences in Cha’s work to explore the ways in which she herself makes use of silence—as a literary device, a method of historiography, and a feminist, postcolonial retelling and revisioning of her own subject position, experiences, and memories within U.S. culture. The complexities of multiple layerings of her text Dictée, as well as Cha’s profound uses and questioning of lanIt murmurs inside. It murmurs. Inside is the pain of speech the pain to say. Larger still. Greater than is the pain not to say. . . . It festers inside. The wound, liquid, dust. Must break. Must void. From another epic another history. From the missing narrative. From the multitude of narratives . Missing. From the chronicles. For another telling for other recitations. Void the words. Void the silence.—Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée guage, engage the many ways silence operates at cultural, discursive, and political levels, as well as in and through historical and collective memory. I am most interested in her experimental text, Dictée, first published in 1982 by Tanam Press.1 However, I also attempt, to some degree, to contextualize my discussion of this text by considering other works by Cha: her shorter writings, conceptual art pieces, and film/video work.2 While Dictée is Cha’s most well-known work, and the majority of her other works are virtually unknown, I believe it is important to understand that Cha produced a great number of pieces, in various forms, and that many of them deal with themes similar to Dictée. I also heed the warning of Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd that “archival work is essential to the critical articulation of minority discourses” and that “theoretical and archival work of minority culture must always be concurrent and mutually reinforcing” (8). The point here is that we not canonize or focus exclusively upon one “minority” text, author, or group at the expense of other works, other writers, or other social groups, effecting a form of tokenization that fails to consider the complexities and richness of any “minority discourse.” Thus, while emphasizing Dict ée, I attempt to place my reading of this text into a broader interpretation of Cha’s oeuvre. I begin with biographical information about Cha and then proceed to a discussion of her work, primarily because her life and work have not, until quite recently, begun to receive the kind of critical attention they deserve.3 For several years, Dictée was out of print, inaccessible, and virtually unknown outside of a small number of academic and artistic communities. Shelley Sunn Wong attributes the ten years of silence surrounding Dictée within Asian American literary communities to criteria within those communities that demanded the “representativeness” and authenticity of an Asian American text (103–104). For example, Lisa Lowe argues that the notion of Asian American identity has involved a homogenization and disavowal of “difference.”4 Not only are Asian Americans seen as “all the same,” rendered interchangeable, but, as stated earlier, Asian American cultural politics have also created a specific, authentic, “Asian American identity”—one that presumes maleness, middle-class status, East Asian heritage, American birth, heterosexuality, and the speaking of English. Of the effects of such processes, Lowe writes: 130 c a r t o g r a p h i e s o f s i l e n c e The essentializing of Asian American identity also reproduces oppositions that subsume other nondominant groups in the same way that Asians and other groups are marginalized by the dominant culture: to the degree that the discourse generalizes Asian American identity as male, women are rendered invisible ; or to the extent that Chinese are presumed to be exemplary of all Asians, the importance of other Asian groups is ignored. (1996, 71) Such a construction...

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