Professor | English and American Studies
Brown University
Daniel Y. Kim is Professor of American Studies and English at Brown University where he teaches classes in Asian American literature, American literature and Ethnic Studies. He has also taught as Norman Freehling Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities and Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at Yale University.
He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and his AB from the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War (NYU Press, 2020) and Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford University Press, 2006) and the co-editor (with Crystal Parikh) of The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2015). His essays have been published in a number of journals, including American Literary History, American Quarterly, Criticism, Cross-Currents, Journal of Asian American Studies, New Literary History, Novel, and positions: asia critique.
Minor Identifications: The Affective Politics of Empire in Cathy Park Hong’s Dance, Dance, Revolution
Abstract
This paper focuses on Cathy Park Hong’s long narrative poem Dance Dance Revolution (2007) which takes up the 1980 massacre in Gwangju in South Korea of pro-democracy student activists and civilians by a repressive military dictatorship—an era that testifies to the continuing afterlife of the Korean War.
This essay focuses on the minor identifications this poem attempts to engender—affective identifications that bring into Glissantian relation, the South Korean sub-imperial and US imperial legacies of Gwangju and settler colonial formations like Israel/Palestine.
Hong’s experimental mode of storytelling—which traverses various languages and sites within the Global South—leaves readers to fill in the gaps between the kinds of military violence that took place in sites like Gwangju and that are currently being wreaked upon Palestinians by Israel, leading them to see the linkages between the US and its subimperial allies and to feel a connection between disparate histories of civilian slaughter.
