Daniel Y. Kim

Associate Professor of English · Brown University · company speakers →

Associate Professor of English at Brown University. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. His book, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford, 2005), brings together Asian American and African American literary studies in an exploration of masculinity in narratives of racialized identity. His current book-in-progress, 'The Dematerialized Zone: American Representations of the Korean War,' examines American cultural representations of what has come to be known as the forgotten war, with a primary aim of working against the seeming historical erasure of this event. The project returns to cultural texts from the 1950s, from novels to films and journalistic accounts, that enable us to understand how this conflict was depicted as it was occurring and to trace how it became forgotten--how it came to be dematerialized in the American historical imaginary. The study also reflects upon the psychic and political issues raised by works of a recent generation of Korean American authors (Susan Choi, Nora Okja Keller, and Chang-rae Lee) that attest to the lingering, if sometimes unarticulated, influence of the war. These authors' writings also occasion a reconsideration of the forms of subjectivity that might emerge through the remembrance of an injurious and significant, though largely forgotten past. He has also published a number of essays including 'Bled in Letter by Letter: Translation, Postmemory and the Subject of Korean War History in Susan Choi's The Foreign Student' in American Literary History (2009), 'Once More With Feeling: Cold War Masculinity and the Sentiment of Patriotism in John Okada's No-No Boy' in Criticism (2005), 'Do I, Too, Sing America? Vernacular Representations and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker' in Journal of Asian American Studies (2003), 'The Strange Love of Frank Chin' in Q&A: Queer in Asian America (1998), and 'Invisible Desires: Homoerotic Racism and Its Homophobic Critique in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man' in Novel (1997).

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