Performing victimhood in Asian American drama.

摘要

This dissertation examines the narrative of victimhood common to some of the dramatic, cultural performances of Asian Americans, with an emphasis on Korean Americans, seeking a wide range of contexts---psychological, sociopolitical, legal, cultural, and literary---for violence and abuse in conflict situations. The claim of victim is not always consonant with the realization of harm, followed by prosecution, which demands a look at varying roles, functions, and statuses of victim in performance. So, when the victim claim manifests in the individual or the collective---and through the voice of Asian Americans in this project---it manifests because it anticipates impressions of, and sympathy for, victims, regardless of the realities of their crises. The value and index of victimhood are in turn manifested by the rhetoric of victimhood, which generates a debate on how to assume victim status as such.;Thus, an attempt to identify Asian Americans as the victim of the American nation-state does not interpret a community solely in terms of emotional loss and suffering, but rather discovers narratives of victimization ideologically charged in that community. This dissertation focuses on the concrete realities and specific contexts of victimhood in American drama to the extent that the distance and difference among victims are generatively related. This project also seeks to underline arguments surrounding different appropriations and identifications of victims in certain historical memories, whilst at the same time sinking deeply into underlying questions concerning the pains shared. Finally, the project intends to recognize the proper names of victims at the moment of their negation, and to interrogate narrative structure revolving around performative victimhood.