Bong Joon Ho Meets Richard Wright: Spatialized Poverty in The Host and Parasite or ‘The Koreans Who Lived Underground’
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Page R. Laws
Abstract
After close readings of two core texts of Black modernism, Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground (both in its recently published novel and its novella form) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, this chapter pivots to use the concept of spatialized (underground) Black poverty, disease, and danger to approach work in a different language, and from a different culture, continent, and genre: South Korean Bong Joon Ho’s transnational cinematic oeuvre, especially The Host and Parasite. Applying “the shame of poverty” theory propagated by Robert Walker and his University of Oxford team, the chapter shows how the racialized underclass can, in the literary and filmic strategies of the works investigated, take on forms of agency to foreshadow a radical reshuffling of high-low, up-down social spatializations.
Abstract
After close readings of two core texts of Black modernism, Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground (both in its recently published novel and its novella form) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, this chapter pivots to use the concept of spatialized (underground) Black poverty, disease, and danger to approach work in a different language, and from a different culture, continent, and genre: South Korean Bong Joon Ho’s transnational cinematic oeuvre, especially The Host and Parasite. Applying “the shame of poverty” theory propagated by Robert Walker and his University of Oxford team, the chapter shows how the racialized underclass can, in the literary and filmic strategies of the works investigated, take on forms of agency to foreshadow a radical reshuffling of high-low, up-down social spatializations.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Table of Contents V
- The Aliens Within: Danger, Disease, and Displacement in Representations of the Racialized Poor 1
-
Danger: Stigmatizing the Racialized Underclass
- Bong Joon Ho Meets Richard Wright: Spatialized Poverty in The Host and Parasite or ‘The Koreans Who Lived Underground’ 21
- “Holes Swarming with Human Beings”: Racing the Urban Underclass in the Antebellum City Mystery Novel 45
- The Black Body as Embodied Sound: Musicking as Personal and Communal Agency against the Othering of the Lettered Gaze in Puerto Rico in the Early Twentieth Century 67
- Representations of the “Aliens Within”: Romanian Jews and Roma in Radu Jude’s Cinema 85
- Alien Horrors: Lovecraft and the Racialized Underclass in the Age of Trump 113
-
Disease: Pathologizing the Other
- Bounding Boukman: The Diseasing of Haitian Bodies in Representations of Race and Culture, from Zombies to Disaster Capitalism 135
- De-Pathologizing Diversity: A Critical Analysis of Racialized Discourses of Difference and Deviance in The Black Border and the Imperative of Reframing Approaches to Linguistic Variation 161
- Sowing the Seeds: Illness as Social Imbalance and Instrument of Social Change in Octavia Butler’s Speculative Fiction 187
- Aliens Without and Within: Abjection from Tetter to Tumor in Toni Morrison’s Novels 209
- African American Women and Stigma: Reactions to Medical Targeting for HIV and COVID-19 233
-
Displacement: Constructing and Countering Collapse
- Spilling Over: Morality and Epidemiology in Ancient and Contemporary Contexts 255
- Socrates in the City of Bones: Plato’s Republic and August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean 277
- Displacement and Discipline: Refugees and the Unemployed in Living and Public Spaces in Greece 293
- Resettled Refugees in the American South: Discourses of Victimization and Transgression in Clarkston, Georgia 315
- Making the Beams of Architectural Poetry out of the Rubble of Displacement: Czesław Miłosz, Taha Muhammad Ali, and the Lyric of Constructed World Citizenry 337
- Notes on Contributors 351
- Index 355
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Table of Contents V
- The Aliens Within: Danger, Disease, and Displacement in Representations of the Racialized Poor 1
-
Danger: Stigmatizing the Racialized Underclass
- Bong Joon Ho Meets Richard Wright: Spatialized Poverty in The Host and Parasite or ‘The Koreans Who Lived Underground’ 21
- “Holes Swarming with Human Beings”: Racing the Urban Underclass in the Antebellum City Mystery Novel 45
- The Black Body as Embodied Sound: Musicking as Personal and Communal Agency against the Othering of the Lettered Gaze in Puerto Rico in the Early Twentieth Century 67
- Representations of the “Aliens Within”: Romanian Jews and Roma in Radu Jude’s Cinema 85
- Alien Horrors: Lovecraft and the Racialized Underclass in the Age of Trump 113
-
Disease: Pathologizing the Other
- Bounding Boukman: The Diseasing of Haitian Bodies in Representations of Race and Culture, from Zombies to Disaster Capitalism 135
- De-Pathologizing Diversity: A Critical Analysis of Racialized Discourses of Difference and Deviance in The Black Border and the Imperative of Reframing Approaches to Linguistic Variation 161
- Sowing the Seeds: Illness as Social Imbalance and Instrument of Social Change in Octavia Butler’s Speculative Fiction 187
- Aliens Without and Within: Abjection from Tetter to Tumor in Toni Morrison’s Novels 209
- African American Women and Stigma: Reactions to Medical Targeting for HIV and COVID-19 233
-
Displacement: Constructing and Countering Collapse
- Spilling Over: Morality and Epidemiology in Ancient and Contemporary Contexts 255
- Socrates in the City of Bones: Plato’s Republic and August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean 277
- Displacement and Discipline: Refugees and the Unemployed in Living and Public Spaces in Greece 293
- Resettled Refugees in the American South: Discourses of Victimization and Transgression in Clarkston, Georgia 315
- Making the Beams of Architectural Poetry out of the Rubble of Displacement: Czesław Miłosz, Taha Muhammad Ali, and the Lyric of Constructed World Citizenry 337
- Notes on Contributors 351
- Index 355
