Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 1951-1982

Korean-America artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born in Busan, South Korea during the Korean War.  Her family eventually moved to the United States in 1962, settling down in California. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Comparative Literature and an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. After leaving university, she moved to Paris, France, where she studied filmmaking and critical theory before returning to the Bay Area as a filmmaker and performance artist.  Cha was raped and killed by a security guard in New York City, New York, a week after the publication of her experimental novel, Dictee.

Although she lived only 31 years, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha left a substantial and diverse body of work. The primary mediums in which she worked were: ceramic, performance, artist’s books, concrete poetry, film, video, sculpture, mail art, audio, and slide projections. In many cases her work combined aspects of different media, blurring the boundaries between conventionally distinct categories. It was characteristic of Cha to take the thematic and formal approaches developed in one medium and reinterpret them in another.  The central theme of Cha’s art is displacement. While she occasionally addressed the personal and historical circumstances of her exile directly, Cha typically treated this theme symbolically, representing displacement through shifts and ruptures in the visual and linguistic forms of her works. 

Some links to sites which reference her work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresa_Hak_Kyung_Cha

Voices from the Gaps, Univ of Minnesota

The Dream of the Audience - This is a site for the forthcoming documentary film about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (currently in post-production). ****The film's Director/Producer - Woo Jung Cho - has recently contacted me.  She is thinking about doing an instagram project about Cha & the film. She has offered an invitation to all of you (my students) who might be interested in taking, tagging, & posting photographs that relate to Dictee/Cha.  If you are interested in this opportunity, just send me an e-mail, and I will get back to her with your interest.

Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee, 1940-

Bharati Mukherjee, (born July 27, 1940, Calcutta, India), Indian-born American novelist and short-story writer whose work reflects Indian culture and immigrant experience.

Mukherjee was born into a wealthy Calcutta family. She attended an anglicized Bengali school from 1944 to 1948. After three years abroad, the family returned to India. Mukherjee attended the University of Calcutta (B.A., 1959) and the University of Baroda (M.A., 1961). She then entered the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, earning an M.F.A. in 1963 and a Ph.D. in 1969. From 1966 to 1980 she lived in Montreal, which she found provincial and racist. She then moved to the U.S. in 1980 and began teaching at the university level. She became a U.S. citizen in 1989 and that year accepted a position teaching postcolonial and world literature at the University of California at Berkeley.

We discussed her story "A Father" in class as we closely read the thematic concerns of: -old world verses new world, -tradition verses progression, -religiosity verses secularism, -family expectation and intimacy, -notions of "success" and the "American dream", -gender construction, and the implicit (and explicit) violence bound to stereotypical identity paradigms.

Some links to sites which feature Mukherjee:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharati_Mukherjee

http://postcolonialstudies.emory.edu/bharati-mukherjee/

http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/mukherjee_bharati.php

Carlos Bulosan

Carlos Sampayan Bulosan, 1913-1956

Carlos Bulosan was a prolific writer and poet, best remembered as the author of America Is in the Heart, a landmark semi-autobiographical story about the Filipino immigrant experience. Bulosan gained recognition in mainstream American society with the 1944 publication of Laughter of my Father, which was excerpted in the New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, and Town and Country. He immigrated to America from the Philippines in 1930, endured horrendous conditions as a laborer, became active in the labor movement, and was blacklisted along with other labor radicals during the 1950s. He spent his last years in Seattle, jobless, penniless, and in poor health.

Many of you have chosen to blog about his story "I Would Remember". In this short story which we read closely in class, his reflective and profound first person narrator explores the impact of death on the journey of life. Themes include displacement, loss, injustice, and the question of 'value' in a human life.

Some links to sites which feature Bulosan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Bulosan

Carlos Bulosan exhibit

Carlos Bulosan, Annanberg Learner site