코로나19 팬데믹과 아시아라는 스타일

Abstract

The anti-Asian racism that has manifested during the coronavirus pandemic recalls the long history of Asian racialization. It recalls the ways in which Asians have been imagined as a doubled figure to bear both racial otherness and historical transformation. The anti-Asian racism also hearkens back to the liminal space inhabited by the Asian body, a precarious position between human and inhuman. The Asian body exists as a sign, not an entity, on which a series of epidermal racial markers appear and onto which all the anxieties around the virus are projected in the displaced form of hate. As an anthropomorphized form for this pandemic’s complex relation to human life, the Asiatic figure becomes a synecdoche for the unprecedented crisis in its retention of these old racial markers. Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) stages this blurred line in the category of race between discrimination (difference) and indiscrimination (identity) through the adventure of a “tiny” Asian girl, Fan. Analyzing the way in which Lee delves into Fan’s unique animacy, this paper argues that On Such a Full Sea stylizes the figure of Asia in two ways. First, the writer coordinates, both in the text’s form and content, the unique feature of Asian racialization in which the Asiatic figure is imagined as an emblem of crisis. Second, through Fan’s movement and its impact upon other characters, Lee also renders the style as a mode of response to affective disturbances of the present and thereby shapes Fan as an embodiment of the crisis style.