Abstract

In this article, I focus on Young-Hyun So’s The Housemaid: A Social History of Poverty and Stigma (2024), which interprets subjects as archives and intersects with Saidiya Hartman’s work. Saidiya Hartman conceptualizes the racial violence that persists in modern society as the "the afterlife of slavery," analyzing how the discrimination and violence experienced by Black women are treated within the archive. Similarly, Young-Hyun So traces the historical trajectory of how the voices of female domestic workers have been silenced in Korean society and conducts research that seeks to uncover the truth conveyed by the archive. Both Hartman and So share a common focus on exploring ways to actively listen to the repressed voices beyond the official records of the archive, proposing the possibility of a new historiography that reconstructs the narratives of marginalized subjects. Hartman has long been preoccupied with the question of how to interpret the archives of Black slavery, focusing on what can and cannot be told from the archive. So diagnoses that the reason why domestic workers have remained invisible and unacknowledged in Korean society is due to the lack of consideration given to how their lives are read. The act of rereading the archive can be viewed as an ethical practice that reflects on how we might live together with the marginalized others who have been rendered invisible in Korean society.