A Critical Analysis of Written and Pictorial Representations in Picturebooks about Koreans in the United States

Abstract

This study explores cultural representations of Korea through a critical content analysis of 29 picturebooks that portray Korean communities and families in the U.S. Framed within the postcolonial theories with a particular lens of othering, the study examines written and pictorial representations of Korean people and culture in the U.S. to unpack the issues of othering, power structure of East and West, Self/Other dichotomy, and resistance of Eurocentric dominant narratives embedded in stories of Korean communities in children’s picturebooks published in the U.S. Critical content analysis is employed as a research methodology in this study to investigate the following research questions: How is Korean culture represented in these picturebooks? How do representations of Korean culture interplay within words and pictures? How do representations of Korean culture shift and/or transform in accordance with the publishing years of picturebooks? How do social, historical, cultural, and political contexts of publishing years interplay with the representations of Korean culture in words and pictures? One of the most significant findings in this study is that the dichotomized opposition brought about by unfair comparisons between Korea and U.S. is both explicitly and implicitly embedded in written and visual representations. It is interpreted through the lens of Orientalism that the unbalanced representations of East/West are rooted in an underlying Western sense of cultural superiority intertwined with power and domination. When it comes to the issues of cultural authenticity, lack of understanding of current socio-cultural contexts and absence of cultural fluidity in cultural representations are critiqued to warn the danger of single story and perpetuation of othering. Postcolonial resistance is also found in cultural representations. As cultural mediators, cultural objects/practices reflect Korean cultural identity illuminating the voices of Koreans in the U.S. The study discovers that these representations function as a form of postcolonial resistance of the Western dominant narratives and hegemonic gaze. Through a postcolonial lens, this critical content analysis further inspects Korean children’s cultural positioning and analyzes the relationship between the dearth of diverse racial characters in Korean children’s socialization and the assimilationist ideology or Eurocentric construction of Self/Other. Finally addressed in the study are socio-economic/political/cultural shifts in Korea reflected in picturebooks. From a postcolonial perspective, the changes in patterns of narratives and representations in picturebooks shed light on the hope of breaking down the binaries of East/West, the hope of resisting the Eurocentric lens of making the other, and the hope of moving from representing to re-presenting cultures.