Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and the Politics of Form
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1982 experimental novel, Dictee, has become a key text in Asian American studies, particularly as the locus for contemporary methodologies in the field. Korean American filmmaker, writer, and performance artist Cha developed her work in the California and New York avant-garde art communities of the late 1960s through the 1970s, then studied semiology in France before returning to the United States to teach and continue her work (Roth 151–60). In 1981, she published the film anthology, Apparatus: Cinematographic Apparatus; including pieces from theorists and artists ranging from Dziga Vertov and Maya Deren, to Roland Barthes, Christian Metz, and Cha herself, the anthology examines the ideological processes of the filmic apparatus. Following her tragic death, her novel Dictee was published in 1982. After nearly a decade of neglect by scholars in Asian American Studies, as Shelley Wong notes, in the early 1990s, the poststructuralist turn in the field enabled and was spurred on by the novel’s interrogation of form, subjectivity, and ideology (Wong 103–6). Since then, numerous studies of the political significance of Dictee have appeared. While some readers choose to emphasize the cultural specificity of the text, many critics focus on the ways in which the narrative disruptions of the novel constitute political disruptions of ideological narratives and formations.