within the context of their collective history within the United States. In chapter 2, I

explore the devastating impact of racism on African-Americans with a focus on Toni

Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye. I borrow the concept of "insidious trauma" from the

ethnographer Maria P. P. Root and use it in order to explain the detrimental effects of

racism, particularly, racial self-loathing, which is the backdrop of the layered traumas of

the Breedlove family Morrison portrays.

 In chapter 3, I turn my attention to the tragic collective fate of the European Jews

who had to endure a massive trauma of incomparable magnitude both in terms of its

severity and the number of its casualties. In analyzing Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies,

A Love Story, which deals with the lives of some Holocaust survivors in post-war New

York, I interpret the protagonist Herman Broder's continuous imaginative reliving of his

war-time ordeal as the symptom of trauma not worked through. Of particular interest is

the irony that the coping mechanisms Herman adopted to survive the Nazi persecution,

such as deception and disguise, bring about his ultimate downfall after the war. I also

note that his former wife, who was presumed to be dead for years, returns after escaping

from the massive open grave of the Jews. I interpret her resurrection rather symbolically

as the symptomatic kernel of the conjoined personal and communal trauma, which, not

worked through properly, is hard to escape from.

 In chapter 4, I explore the issue of immigration, cross-cultural passage, and loss

portrayed in the Korean-American novelist Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker. The novel

depicts Asian Americans' difficult struggle for survival as what I call "interstitial ethnic

subjects" who exist as "inside-outsiders" positioned between the whites and the blacks. I

read the trope of "spying," presented by Henry Parks' profession as an ethnic spy, as the