Abstract

This paper aims to identify the key features of the novel writing of Korean American immigrants and their meaning as one aspect of movement and contact occuring in the early modern period. The late return of the novels written by Nakcheong THUN in the 1930s is significant in that it restored ideas on the diversity of early modern mobility and confronted the history and culture of immigrants who were excluded from records and memories. Not only are these novels a product of the phenomenon of immigration, but they have also created a crack in the dichotomous perceptions of domination and subordination, center and periphery by envisioning it as a space that creates new history, culture, institutions and values. These novels treat the free love of intellectual, emotional, and ethical figures as a central event, demystifying Western free love, and at the same time, a society divided by various identities including class, race, and gender. The novels by Nakchung THUN visualize the active exchange between the immigrant and the indigenous community through the character of Jack, and imagines the heterotopia as a place where not for the immigrants’ utopia, but for everyone’s coexists. These novels have declared a kind of memory war on the subordinate and marginalized contact zones. The contact zones of the immigration area had been a place for experiencing extreme conflicts and discords, and at the same time, it has served as a place where various groups and communities are connected. The contact zones were common areas of solidarity and creation before being subject to division and occupation. The contact zones are far from the border or borderlands, so it is not a fixed and immutable deadlock. As a world free from central domination the contact zones have been a space that preoccupied history and culture through various encounters, and have been a community.