Melancholic Haunting in Korean American Literature

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dc.contributorMaye, Kristen
dc.contributorTucker, Kenneth
dc.contributor.advisorDay, Iyko
dc.contributor.authorLi, Christina
dc.date.accessioned2025-07-15T12:01:02Z
dc.date.available2025-07-15T12:01:02Z
dc.date.gradyear2025
dc.date.issued2025-07-15
dc.description.abstractDavid L. Eng and Shinhee Han’s “Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans” defines racial melancholia as a state of chronic and unresolved grief in which the Asian American subject grapples with a sense of loss but does not know the object that they have lost. Racial melancholia also encompasses racial dissociation, characterized by a disconnection from one’s racial identity and a fragmented sense of self resulting from racial loss. This thesis considers how Korean American literature extends Eng and Han’s provided paradigm of racial melancholia and dissociation transnationally to consider colonized subjects and colonial histories beyond the United States, specifically Japanese colonization of Korea. In tracing racial melancholia as a vestige of Japanese colonialism that is both transnational in scope and intergenerational in impact, I look at three literary texts — Pachinko (2017) by Min Jin Lee, A Gesture Life (1999) by Chang-Rae Lee, and “Yellow” (2001) by Don Lee. I position my analysis of these three texts in this particular order to trace the movement of racial melancholia across generations and countries. As with Pachinko, I focus on Noa whose family moves from Korea to raise him in Japan, then in A Gesture Life, Doc Hata who was born in Japan and moves to the United States, and finally with “Yellow,” Danny who is second-generation Korean American and belongs to the generation after colonization. I argue that not only is racial melancholia born and instilled into the Korean characters during the era of Japanese colonization but it is also an inherited condition that haunts the Korean diaspora. By analyzing racial melancholia in a transnational framework, this thesis proposes that the legacies of Japanese colonialism are reproduced and sustained through the structures of white supremacy.
dc.description.sponsorshipEnglish
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10166/6769
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.rights.restrictedrestricted
dc.subjectJapanese Colonization
dc.subjectKorean American Literature
dc.subjectRacial Melancholia
dc.subjectRacial Dissociation
dc.titleMelancholic Haunting in Korean American Literature
dc.typeThesis
mhc.degreeUndergraduate
mhc.institutionMount Holyoke College

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