Discomforting Knowledge: Or, Korean "Comfort Women" and Asian Americanist Critical Practice

Abstract

To think through some of the issues attending to Asian Americanist objectification of "comfort women," Chuh examines the uses to which certain novels - namely, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman and Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life - put the "comfort woman." Through this consideration, she works toward making some broader claims about the ways and means of critical practice in Asian Americanist discourse. What can particular narrativizations of "comfort women," like those offered by Lee and Keller, tell us about the contours and objectives of our critical practices? What kind of work can and does the production of knowledge focused around "comfort women" in Asian American studies do, in terms of facilitating a particular kind of politics — or, even more pointedly, in terms of facilitating justice? Chuh suggests that by interrogating Lee's and Keller's respective novelistic uses of "comfort women," we gain critical insight into the thematicization of these figures in Asian American studies.