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"Sohn, Stephen Hong"
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Racial asymmetries : Asian American fictional worlds
\"Challenging the tidy links among authorial position, narrative perspective, and fictional content, Stephen Hong Sohn argues that Asian American authors have never been limited to writing about Asian American characters or contexts. Racial Asymmetries specifically examines the importance of first person narration in Asian American fiction published in the postrace era, focusing on those cultural productions in which the author's ethnoracial makeup does not directly overlap with that of the storytelling perspective. Through rigorous analysis of novels and short fiction, such as Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex, Sabina Murray's A Carnivore's Inquiry and Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind, Sohn reveals how the construction of narrative perspective allows the Asian American writer a flexible aesthetic canvas upon which to engage issues of oppression and inequity, power and subjectivity, and the complicated construction of racial identity. Speaking to concerns running through postcolonial studies and American literature at large, Racial Asymmetries employs an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the unbounded nature of fictional worlds. Stephen Hong Sohn is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University. He is the co-editor of Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Inscrutable belongings : queer Asian North American fiction
Inscrutable Belongings brings together formalist and contextual modes of critique to consider narrative strategies that emerge in queer Asian North American literature. Stephen Hong Sohn provides extended readings of fictions involving queer Asian North American storytellers, looking to texts including Russell Leong's \"Camouflage,\" Lydia Kwa's Pulse, Alexander Chee's Edinburgh, Nina Revoyr's Wingshooters, and Noël Alumit's Letters to Montgomery Clift. Despite many antagonistic forces, these works' protagonists achieve a revolutionary form of narrative centrality through the defiant act of speaking out, recounting their \"survival plots,\" and enduring to the very last page. These feats are made possible through their construction of alternative social structures Sohn calls \"inscrutable belongings.\"
Collectively, the texts that Sohn examines bring to mind foundational struggles for queer Asian North Americans (and other socially marginalized groups) and confront a broad range of issues, including interracial desire, the AIDS/HIV epidemic, transnational mobility, and postcolonial trauma. In these texts, Asian North American queer people are often excluded from normative family structures and must contend with multiple histories of oppression, erasure, and physical violence, involving homophobia, racism, and social death. Sohn's work makes clear that for such writers and their imagined communities, questions of survival, kinship, and narrative development are more than representational—they are directly tied to lived experience.
eBook
“Brainless Creatures”: Race, Animality, and the Migrant/Refugee in Dao Strom’s Grass Roof, Tin Roof
This article engages in a reading of the second chapter from Dao Strom’s novel Grass Roof, Tin Roof. The analysis is concerned with a posthuman moment: Hus Madsen, the patriarch of a Vietnamese American family, is accosted by a neighbor spewing racist rhetoric. This article’s title, “brainless creatures” (52), is an invocation of Hus’s conception of a hierarchy that places humans at the top and dimwitted animals at the bottom. This arrangement becomes destabilized by the chapter’s events, as Hus’s Vietnamese American family members are figured by that neighbor as subhuman, parasitic creatures. Such events reveal what Sohn denotes as a neo-yellow peril discourse, a mode of racialized storytelling that renders the Vietnamese American within an ambivalent narrative and contextual position.
Journal Article
MINOR CHARACTER, MINORITY ORIENTALISMS, AND THE BORDERLANDS OF ASIAN AMERICA
This article focuses on a strain of American Orientalist depiction in which a Chicano writer makes use of an Asian American minor character within the fictional world. The argument investigates why the Chicano author is invested in minority Orientalism as a means by which to explore the interconnectedness of Asian American and Chicano populations. The argument unfolds through an analysis of Alejandro Morales's speculative novel,The Rag Doll Plagues, which includes a hardworking and ambitious Asian American female cyborg, a figure who illustrates the tenuousness of racial inclusion. The novel further depicts how racial groups swap places in the social hierarchy. The representational terrain unveils the plasticity in the model minority configuration, as those of a specific Mexican descent become elevated above others.
Journal Article
'This is Cousinland': The Korean War, Post-Armistice Poetics, and Reparative Aesthetics in Julayne Lee's Not My White Savior
This article engages in an in-depth critical reading of Julayne Lee's poetry collection, Not My White Savior (2018). It focuses on how Lee's lyrics involve forms of repetition and variation to institute a reparative aesthetic. The article considers Lee's historical excavation of the Korean War and the violent manifestations that have occurred since the Armistice was signed in 1953. The article proceeds with readings that cover a variety of issues, including overseas Korean adoption, the plight of single Korean mothers, the need to develop more robust models for alternative kinships, as well as the speculative tropes deployed by Lee in these various poetic depictions. Finally, the article persistently investigates poetic techniques, including the refrain and the repetend, as part of Lee's lyrical approaches. Lee's lyric project ultimately reimagines overseas adopted Koreans as a fellowship, one promoting activism and social justice.
Journal Article
Across the Divides: Korean Poetry and Korean American Translators
[...]Yi Sang's work would be considered as having introduced key modes and concepts of Dada and surrealism into Korean literature. The final lines gesture to the figurative tension created when the lyric speaker cannot control the realm of the imagination, a prison-like space that becomes inhospitable to sociality and community. The reference to the Vietnam War recalls South Korea's participation in the fighting, as South Korea had agreed to provide military support to the United States. Whereas Yi Sang's poem can be read through its colonial critique of Japan, Kim's poem directly concerns South Korea's neocolonial relationship with the United States as well as its tense standoff with North Korea.5 The birds thus become a possible metaphor for South Korea, as the country continues to face internal divisions over its connection to
Journal Article
Model Minority Terrorist
Since 1966, the predominant racial formation attached to Asian Americans has been that of the model minority. Hartnell's larger point is that the novel critiques the melting pot formulation precisely because America's racial and religious minorities rarely inhabit the same positions in social hierarchies and are often positioned against one another. In light of the heightened paranoia, Shireen Roshanravan investigates how the targeting of Filipino airport screeners after the terrorist attacks demonstrated a large-scale attack on civil liberties in the name of homeland security and further solidified the \"racial blurring of brown peoples\" (152). Interestingly, the Asiatic Barred Zone included large portions of the Middle East as well as southern areas of what was then called Siberia (Browne 23; Samhan 14-15).2 For a brief time following 1917, individuals who hailed from Greater Syria (a group including Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria) were legislatively considered to be a kind of alien \"Asian,\" to be excluded from entry into the United States (Nigem 630; Samhan 14-15).
Journal Article
Toward Korean American Ethnoformalisms: The Historian-Archivist and Speculative Gendered Empowerments in Minsoo Kang's Of Tales and Enigmas
This article engages in an exploration of a Korean American speculative fiction, Minsoo Kang's Of Tales and Enigmas, that has already gone out of print despite being published in 2006. I explore why this work has been overlooked, detailing the complicated positioning of Kang's work vis-a-vis discourses of speculative fiction and Korean American literatures. I then move to an analysis of some key short stories that provide an apparatus into considering how the collection can be reclaimed as a work of archival recovery. I focus on the ways that Kang deploys a historian-archivist as a narrator, who helps to cohere stories disparate in style, content, and cultural specificity. I ultimately argue that this storytelling figure focuses on female figures who are jeopardized in the context of war and violence, recentering these women through speculative tropes, including cyborg subjectivity and ghostliness.
Journal Article
\EXPERIMENT IS EACH SCROLL OF WHITE PAGES JOINED TOGETHER\: READING PUNCTUATION, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE IN MYUNG MI KIM'S \DURA\
With its mathematical vocabulary, innovative geometrical form, lyric density, and funky deployment of punctuation, Dura exemplifies Kim's interest in poetic experimentation. This article investigates how Kim negotiates two foci through Dura: on the one hand, employing experimental linguistics that grant punctuation, mathematical notations, and scientific vocabulary multiple signifying possibilities, while on the other, pushing forth a political project that speaks to the continuing issue of radical social inequalities. Punctuation, mathematics, and science all operate under a rubric of efficiency. Punctuation enables more effective forms of communication, while mathematical and scientific advances enable inventions that provide greater comfort, easier transport, faster communication, and other improvements. But Kim's lyric style in Dura questions the logic of efficiency that undergirds modes of standardization and perceived trajectories of advancement. Hence, the use of experimental punctuation and nonstandard use of mathematical and scientific language enable Dura to stage a trenchant critique of driving forces behind colonialism and empire.
Journal Article