Symbolic Translation: Psychoanalysis, Race, and the Korean/American Subject

Abstract

This dissertation introduces ‘symbolic translation’ as a new critical framework, developed through Lacanian psychoanalysis, to theorize Korean/American subjectivity as a condition of structural misrecognition, symbolic illegibility, and forced assimilation. I define symbolic translation as the reconfiguration of being in response to exclusion from the dominant Symbolic Order. Bridging Lacanian psychoanalytic theory with Asian American studies, the project interrogates how dominant Symbolic Orders fail to fully recognize racialized Korean/American subjects, rendering them illegible within existing regimes of meaning. Departing from prevailing paradigms of cultural hybridity or ‘model minority’ assimilation, symbolic translation foregrounds the structural violence, forced displacement, and enduring illegibility imposed by those dominant orders. This dissertation critiques assimilationist narratives that promise seamless integration, revealing how such scripts mask ongoing structures of exclusion and self-erasure. Through close readings of Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student, Suki Kim’s The Interpreter, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman, and HBO’s Lovecraft Country, the analysis shows how these Korean/American depictions deploy creative strategies—fragmented language, spectral hauntings, and even mythic figures—to expose the limits of the assimilative ideal and to envision alternative modes of being. By advancing symbolic translation as an original critical lens, this study offers an account of how diasporic subjects navigate and survive the structural failures of recognition. In doing so, the project expands psychoanalytic approaches to racial difference and offers Asian American studies a new vocabulary for understanding assimilation and its discontents.