Original scientific paper
For Cosmetic Change: Yongsoo Park's Boy Genius
Brian Willems
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Split
Abstract
In Yongsoo Park's 2002 novel Boy Genius, both meaning and change are located on the surface. Full of absurd imagery, the novel turns the horrors of assimilation into a challenge to the racism of color-blindness and depth. If, as Christopher Pinney argues, the stable identities of the "depth" are the product of colonial regimes, then the surface can become a "site of the refusal" of such oppressive certainties. Through what Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus call "surface reading," the "experiential force of the image's visuality" (Rosalind Galt), which can also be found in Park's novel, is foregrounded. What Park's novel adds to the discussion is that if oppressive regimes are enacted on the surface of the body, then it is on the surface of the body that a counter-attack can be launched. In other words, the coordinates of assimilation are turned into a means to smuggle in the possibility for difference and change.
Keywords
Yongsoo Park; surface reading; Korean-American literature; racism; cosmetic change
Hrčak ID:
278148
URI
Publication date:
27.5.2022.
Visits: 847 *