Performance, Materiality, Postmemory: Dancing Toward History in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE both challenges oppressive ideological structures embedded within language and cedes to language’s inability to throw off these structures entirely, leaving critics to ask whether the text extends beyond a critique of language ideologies. Motivated by a photograph of the author’s great-great-aunt that appears on the text’s back cover, this thesis interweaves examinations of DICTEE’s material elements with the author’s personal experiences to demonstrate how Cha offers concrete methods by which a reader can develop a novel mode of reading. In this mode, the text operates as a thing—an archive, even—with which the reader performs through acts of physical movement, material refiguration, and dance-like repetition. The author’s encounters with the text further exemplify the particular experience of Korean American readers, who can employ this mode to productively confront the suppressive experience of postmemory. Frames of performance and materiality thus illuminate DICTEE as a text which exceeds ideological critique by expanding its expressive functions from the realm of the linguistic to that of the spatial.

Type of resource	text
Date created	May 2020

Author	Kim, Maddie
Degree granting institution	Stanford University
Primary advisor	Kantor, Roanne
Advisor	Kwon, Marci

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/gd950xr2526

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred Citation: Kim, Maddie. (2020). Performance, Materiality, Postmemory: Dancing Toward History in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE
. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/gd950xr2526

Stanford University, Program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Honors Theses

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