Jeehyun Choi | Dubbing Utopia in the Early Korean American Novel

Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard's Novel Theory Seminar and Dialectical Thinking in the Humanities Seminar
Co-sponsored by the Harvard Korea Institute

Jeehyun Choi, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University

Jeehyun Choi (Ph.D., Berkeley) is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Rutgers University, where she studies and teaches Asian American and diasporic literatures, with particular interest in transpacific cultural productions that engage the history of multiple imperialisms in Asia. Her current book project examines the political commitments of Korean American/diasporic writers who produce new modalities of anti-imperial resistance in transnational contexts. Her work pivots around newly discovered and forgotten texts written in Korean and English, arguing that a translingual understanding of Asian American literature forces us to reconsider enduring narratives of Asian diasporic history. Before coming to Rutgers, she was a Korea Foundation-Korea Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University.

Chaired by Deidre Lynch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, Harvard University and Yoon Sun Lee, Anne Pierce Rogers Professor in American Literature and Professor of English, Wellesley College

Abstract:
Jeehyun Choi will discuss her research on the literary and political archive of Nak Chung Thun, a Californian immigrant farmworker who left behind a substantial but unpublished body of Korean-language writing in the 1930s. Focusing on Thun’s novel Righteous Robber (Kujejŏk kangdo, ca. 1935), Choi examines the significance of writing America in Korean and argues that the novel imagines a convergence of political and linguistic utopias within the genre of romance.