Korean American literature: Literary orphans and the legacy of Han

In this dissertation, I explore how history creates postcolonial shadows that linger over Korean American writers of the first and second generations. These shadows, I argue, converge in the trope of the orphan, which along with signaling Korea's colonial past, also signals the failure of the American state to make room in the national family for the racialized figure of difference. I argue that a diaspora model, more than a postcolonial or minority discourse model, allows us to examine how colonial identity lingers beyond a postcolonial paradigm, travels (though not unchanged) across generations and oceans, and is then renegotiated by new disciplining structures which are, at the same time, implicated within colonial identity.; I apply a diasporic lens to eight novels, establishing a central theme in each chapter: the metaphoricity of the orphan in Elizabeth Kim's Ten Thousand Sorrows and Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother; the burden of history in Chang-me Lee's A Gesture Life and Susan Choi's The Foreign Student; the role of domesticity in Patti Kim's A Cab Called Reliable and Suki Kim's The Interpreter; and the redemption of the orphan in Frances Park's When My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon and Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl. While the trope of the orphan in each narrative figures differently, together these chapters reflect a trajectory which I see as characteristic of Korean American literature. The general movement from Korea to the US does not reflect a narrative of assimilation and acculturation but rather a trajectory characteristic of diaspora. There is a movement away from Korea, but brrnuse the past continues to pull on the present through individual and collective memory, redemption in the present can be achieved only by acknowledging and embracing the past.