Daniel Kim

Associate Professor:
English
Phone: (401) 863-3748
Daniel_Kim@brown.edu

Daniel Y. Kim's primary research field is 20th-century U. S. literature with a particular focus on the Asian American and African American traditions, ethnic studies, gender studies, and the Cold War.

Biography

Daniel Y. Kim is author of Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford University Press, 2005). He is currently working on a book provisionally titled The Korean War in Color. He has published articles in American Literary History, Criticism, The Journal of Asian American Studies, and Novel.

Interests

Daniel Y. Kim's primary research field is 20th-century U. S. literature with a particular focus on the Asian American and African American traditions, ethnic studies, gender studies, and the Cold War.

He is the author of Reading Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford University Press, 2005). This book examines literary representations of racialized masculinity, and it is the first study to do so in a comparative – African-American and Asian-American – context. Through detailed analyses of two exemplary figures, it identifies a gendered and sexualized rhetoric that both black and Asian male writers have drawn upon to depict the violent psychic effects of white racism on men of color; it also brings into focus the persistent and seductive belief that the domain of literature provides a measure of mobility from the repressive constructions of minority identity that prevail in a racist order. This study – like much recent work that has been generated at the intersections of feminist, gender, gay/lesbian and ethnic studies – illuminates the intimate relationship between the various modalities of identity that exert an essentializing power in the production of modern subjectivity: race, gender and sexuality. Its particular contributions to this body of work stem from its comparative scope and the specific emphasis it places on literary ideology – its exploration of how a sexual and racial politics of identity becomes articulated as a literary politics.

He is currently working on a book provisionally titled The Korean War in Color. In it he examines US cultural representations of the Korean War in an interracial and transnational framework, focusing on depictions of Asians, Asian Americans and African Americans. One of its primary aims is to work against the seeming historical erasure of this event by returning us to a range of texts from the 1950s (novels, films and journalistic accounts), thereby bringing into focus the watershed role that the war played in the framing of dominant liberal narratives of race and empire. This study also addresses the psychic and political issues raised by recent American authors (Clarence Adams, Susan Choi, Chang-rae Lee, John A. Williams) whose works suggest the afterlife of this conflict in American articulations of race.

There are two parts to this study, the first of which focuses on texts from the 1950s. Emergent in the films, novels and journalistic texts I examine are two larger cultural narratives that comprise the dominant interpretive framework for the war. These I call screen narratives, for they provide a kind of screen onto which the war's events are projected, framing certain explanatory possibilities while screening off others. The first I address in chapter one: It interprets the conflict as being about the domestic problem of black-white race relations, and it takes shape in popular texts that emphasize this war as the first fought by a wholly integrated military. Chapter 2 addresses the second screen narrative which emerges in a sizable body of popular cultural works from the 1950s that center on the Japanese and Japanese Americans. I suggest how these texts attempt to manage racial anxieties that were exacerbated by the Korean War, an event that radically disrupted the relatively stable Orientalism of an earlier war. This cultural narrative ends up recapitulating a prior erasure: the period of the Occupation, when all Korean subjects were regarded by the United States as legal subjects of the Japanese Empire.

Part II turns to the strategies of remembrance (and non-remembrance) that structure the novels of Susan Choi, Nora Okja Keller, Chang-rae Lee. These recent texts all engage with the two screen narratives I refer to above, suggesting their continuing cultural presence. I show this influence to be, however, both disabling and productive. The third chapter reads how their novels engage with the black-white racial binary that played a crucial role in the national process of forgetting the Korean War; the fourth examines how they suggest the continuation of a pattern whereby "Korea" is only legible through an association with "Japan." I demonstrate how the persistent influence of these screen narratives – which can suggest the erasure of Korean or Korean-American concerns – can also facilitate the emergence of a powerfully expansive and novel script for telling the story of how present identity might be shaped by past trauma. For the Korean-American narrative script emergent from these novels is a motley one – stitched together from narrative conventions that have been associated with other racial groups – and therein lies its capacity to gesture toward a much more expansive and agile sense of political subjectivity than might emerge from a more monologic and monoracial remembering of the Korean War.

The book opens with an introduction that lays out the conception of cultural memory it elaborates: one that draws from Holocaust studies and African-American studies. It engages most extensively with Marianne Hirsch's conception of postmemory, which refers to a second-generation cultural memory belonging not so much to the surviving witnesses of past atrocities, but to their descendants; postmemory also signifies a collective relation to past suffering that moves away from ossified conceptions of ethnic identity toward ones that are more ethically supple. The book closes with an analysis of the works of Mexican-American author and Korean War veteran Rolando Hinojosa. His writings make visible the nexus of imperial endeavors that have shaped U.S. racial politics, both domestically and internationally, by drawing parallels between the violently imposed borders that are the legacy of U.S. imperialism in the Americas and in Asia.

Degrees

PhD UC Berkeley (1997), AB Michigan (1988)

Awards

Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, U.C. Berkeley, 1995-96

U.C. President's Fellowship (Graduate Mentorship Award), 1989-93

Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities (Honorary), 1989

Phi Beta Kappa (University of Michigan), 1987

Affiliations

Modern Language Association

Association for Asian American Studies

American Studies Association

Funded Research

Cogut Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship, Brown University, 2006

Henry Merritt Wriston Faculty Fellowship, Brown University, 2000-01

Presidential Faculty Research Fellowship, Pembroke Center, Brown University, 1998-99

Curriculum Vitae

Download Daniel Kim's Curriculum Vitae in PDF Format