plight of the interstitial ethnic subject. Additionally, I also interpret Henry's difficult

relationship with his father as an inverted Oedipal drama, in which the immigrant father

becomes a fallen, deposed patriarch who inadvertently provokes and intensifies his son's

assimilative desire. Finally, I approach the death of Henry's biracial child, as well as the

ultimate downfall of Kwang, a Korean American politician Henry is assigned to spy on,

in terms of their symbolic social implications that hint at the ethnic future of America.

 In my final chapter, I examine questions of interpretation and the politics of

mourning concerning traumatic events. The need to contain, tame, and control any threat

to the social order compels the social politics of mourning. The politics of mourning

deflects attention from the traumatogenic forces within society, which disenfranchise and

inflict psychic wounds upon certain selected groups. Arguing that the deliberate restaging

of trauma in a controlled, empathic environment helps to counteract both the pernicious,

ever-lasting effects of trauma and the controlling social politics of mourning, I explore

the performative, healing dimension of trauma literature that portrays and resignifies

cataclysmic events and their victims in order to expose, critique, or deconstruct the

wounding forces that cause trauma and unspoken grief.



 Notes

1 Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, The \huie, lAssumptions: Toward a New Psychology of
Trauma (New York: Free Press, 1992), 5.

2 Charles Edward Robins, New York Voices: The Trauma of 9/11 (Madison: Psychosocial
Press, 2003), 14.

3 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, SE 18 (1920), 29.

4 Kirby Farrell, Post-traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties,
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998).