Heidi Kim

Web site of Professor Heidi Kim, Dept. of English and Comparative Literature

Month: June 2012

Fred Korematsu

June 25, 2012 /

Just out!  “When You Can’t Tell Your Friends from the Japs: Reading the body in the Korematsu case.”  Journal of Transnational American Studies special issue in honor of Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, spring-summer 2012 (4(1)).

Fred Korematsu, plaintiff of the landmark 1944 case Korematsu v. United States, famously had cosmetic surgery on his face to try to escape the ‘internment,’ the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.  This article examines the popular and legal discussion of his surgery at that time, which show that fears of Japanese spies and the supposed inability to distinguish Japanese, captured in the famous Life magazine article “How To Tell Your Friends from the Japs,” directly influenced the courts’ rulings on the legality of the internment.  The deliberate decision of the Supreme Court to excise this issue from the Korematsu opinion, which disclaimed racism as a root cause of the internment, is exposed through archival documents and drafts that betray a deep interest in his surgery, as do the government and lower court documents.  As a heroic figurehead of civil rights, Korematsu complicates the discussion of surgical patients as complicit, drawing attention instead to the legalized discrimination that drives such choices.  Likewise, key Supreme Court cases benefit from a close reading of the issue of mutable appearance and racial passing, as they show a common anxiety and inability to define race precisely on the body.

The issue is available for free online.

I was delighted to be able to participate in an issue to honor Sau-ling Wong and her many contributions to the field of Asian American studies.  In particular, her idea of “food pornography” is always a hit with students!

 

ALA Whitman panel

June 7, 2012 /

I was happy to chair the Walt Whitman society panel at the American Literature Association in 2012, which featured three different but fascinating papers on Whitman’s careful print layout and typography choices, his reading of Dante and how that influenced his depiction of war as hell, and his influence on two modern ethnic writers and the discourse of gays in the military.

Gotanda and Tenorio

June 7, 2012 /

In May 2012, I chaired an author reading session organized by the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies at the American Literature Association. This featured playwright Philip Kan Gotanda, a now-frequent guest of mine, and prose fiction writer Lysley Tenorio, whose new collection Monstress has just come out. Lysley read from Monstress, and Philip read from two of his new plays, Love in American Times and I Dream of Chang and Eng.

AAAS roundtable on JA incarceration

June 7, 2012 /

In April 2012, I joined Greg Robinson, Setsuko Nishi, Gene Oishi, and Cherstin Lyon for a roundtable on New Approaches to the Japanese American Incarceration.  Greg and Cherstin are historians, Setsuko is a sociologist, and Gene is a novelist and retired journalist.  We had a lively discussion of our new works in progress and the enduring importance of researching and reaching out to talk about one of the biggest civil rights violations in modern U.S. history.

Faulkner and the Mississippi Chinese

June 7, 2012 /

“The Foreigner in Yoknapatawpha: Rethinking race in the global South” was published in a  Philological Quarterly special issue: The New Southern Studies and the New Modernist Studies in Spring & Summer 2012 (90(2&3): 199-228).

Though it’s not a well-known fact, there was a small but very visible Chinese minority in Mississippi throughout the years of Faulkner’s active writing career, and one that came to national fame in a Supreme Court case about whether they should be put in white or black public schools.  When Joe Christmas first arrives in Jefferson in Light in August, a sulky, light-colored man with no money and city clothing, the townsfolk label him a “foreigner.”  His name and indefinable appearance allow him to exist in an undefined limbo between black and white until he transgresses social boundaries in both directions, unlike the lone Chinese man in The Town and the Chinese population in real life.  Starting with the definition of foreignness in Light in August and reading through Intruder in the Dust (1948) and The Town (1957), I examine the role of the the Chinese as the most visible exponents of the foreign as a new party in Faulkner’s tortured generations of Southern history, comparing his surprisingly elastic social structures with the contemporaneous restrictions on the growing Chinese population in legal and social arenas.  Gong Lum v. Rice (1927), the landmark Supreme Court case that turned away from the singular consideration of African Americans as the “colored race” to define the Chinese as one of the “colored races” resonates with the white supremacist in Light who asserts superiority over “any and all other races.”  Ike McCaslin, one of Faulkner’s characters, voices hatred of the “spawning” and “breeding” Chinese, among other races, but even Faulkner’s extension of racial hysteria over miscegenation to include the Chinese who were moving into the Delta offers, as well, the possibility of eventual social intermixture and inclusion in his American South.

This article won PQ‘s annual Hardin Craig Prize for the article that has best advanced scholarship in its field.

Link here (requires Chadwyck subscription).

 

 

A Francophone antislavery epic

June 7, 2012 /

“The Francophone Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was published in the Little-Known Documents section of PMLA (Proceedings of the Modern Language Association) in May 2010 (125(3):798-815).

Charles Testut, a French-born Creole radical publisher and writer, wrote an epic novel detailing the adventures and eventual triumph of a married couple of Guadeloupean slaves illegally sold to the United States.  It bears clear resemblances to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but with Testut’s politics and his heavy French Romantic influence (by writers such as Alexandre Dumas), it is much more violent, sexual, and openly political a novel, with several diatribes against Catholic zealots, Louisiana judicial corruption, and racial prejudice.  Though it was written before the Civil War, Testut was only able to publish the novel in 1872.

Article link here (requires subscription or pay per article). More information and an excerpt are available here.

Walt Whitman and Anglo-Saxonism

June 7, 2012 /

My article “From Language to Empire: Walt Whitman in the Context of Popular Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Saxonism” was published in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review in the Summer 2006 issue (24(1):1-19).

This article contextualizes Walt Whitman’s invocations of Anglo-Saxon culture and its uneasy connections to white supremacist writing by comparing his words to those of many popular magazines and newspapers dealing with the subject, from editorials in the most prominent newspapers to specialist magazine The Anglo-Saxon.  The slippery slope from the cherishing of Anglo-Saxon words and literature to the racialist or imperialist ambitions of England and the United States can be traced in both Whitman and the other work, but Whitman’s emphasis on diversity and the freedom of the individual takes his Anglo-Saxonism in a new and unexpected direction.

Link to article here.

To Herself

June 7, 2012 /

My short story “To Herself” was published in the inaugural issue of the Kartika Review in Winter 2007.  You can read it for free online.  It can also be purchased in the Inaugural Year Anthology.

“To Herself” imagines the exasperation of an overworked public schoolteacher dealing with a difficult child who won’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance–and the sensitivity that she feels required to show to the child’s equally difficult and surprising mother.

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