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This chapter makes the case that Willa Cather and Abraham Cahan present immigrant characters in their fiction as potentially powerful figures by virtue of their bi- and multilingualism. These, and other writers such as John Dos Passos, Mike Gold, and Anzia Yezierska, show that those who master English as well as the languages into which they are born are socially, geographically, artistically, and intellectually mobile figures. Such characters, in their codeswitching, exemplify a kind of linguistic mobility that is at the heart of ethnic American modernist literature, and that demonstrates pluralistic values that were often socially and politically absent in the period of their creation. These modernist writers look to language and the interpolation of foreign languages, whether through translational mimesis, codeswitching, or selective reproduction, as empowering. In doing so, they demonstrate the rich potential of an ethnic American literary modernism. The immigrant’s voice, with all its inflections and idiosyncrasies, is presented as the accent of the future.
This chapter talks about two most prominent early Korean/American writers, Younghill Kang and Richard Eun-kook Kim. Kang made numerous attempts to become naturalized as a US citizen, including separate special bills introduced specifically on his behalf in the US House of Representative and Senate in 1939. One of the historiographic virtues of Kang's work is that both Korea and the United States, from the perspective of an exile, become heterotopic spaces, meta-sites of otherness that reveal the underlying values and desires that animate them. Fiction for both writers involved not only presenting a foreign culture to an American audience but also narrating the various complexities of intercultural exchange. For Kang and Kim, it is specifically the geopolitical changes inaugurated by emergent and resurgent American-century imperialism and hegemony in myriad forms that forge new alliances and partnerships that flower into happy marriages or falter into disconcerting proximities and competing interests.
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