Skip to main content

Yumi Pak

Occidental College, Black Studies, Faculty Member

California State University, San Bernardino, English, Faculty Member

Hamilton College, Africana Studies, Faculty Member

University of California, San Diego, Literature/Cultural Studies, Alumna

University of Edinburgh, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Visiting Research Fellow

Followers

126

Following

121

Co-authors

2

Public Views

Yumi Pak is a student, scholar and instructor of Black literary and cultural studies, particularly within the overlaps and interstices between the United States, Scotland and Jamaica.

She is currently associate professor of Black Studies at Occidental College. From 2014-2022, she was assistant/associate professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino, where she offered courses on select Black literary and cultural productions, Queer of Color Critique, Black Feminist Theory and Performance Studies. She also held an appointment as director of Ethnic Studies, a long-standing program at CSUSB; in 2022, she co-founded the Department of Ethnic Studies with Dr. Diana Johnson and Dr. Hareem Khan. She was visiting assistant professor of Africana Studies at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, during the 2013-2014 academic year. Yumi earned her Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of California, San Diego, in 2012.

less

InterestsView All (20)

Uploads

Papers by Yumi Pak

"Say, Who Owns This House?": US Violence, Indebtedness, and Care in Toni Morrison's Home

MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2022

Whose house is this? Whose night keeps out the light In here? Say, who owns this house? It's not ... more Whose house is this? Whose night keeps out the light In here? Say, who owns this house? It's not mine. I dreamed another, sweeter, brighter With a view of lakes crossed in painted boats; Of fields wide as arms open for me. This house is strange. Its shadows lie. Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?-Toni Morrison (Home) Home (2012), Toni Morrison's tenth novel, strikes readers with its deceptive slenderness; much like the house in the epigraph, it evokes an atmosphere of nooks and crannies where shadows and truths lie, in both senses of that word. Yet, like the character Frank Money's paralyzing fugue states that dull his senses to the world, the actual heft of the novel is felt in the possibilities created by things unseen and unsaid. Taking place in the mid-1950s, the novel follows two seemingly disparate story lines, the first being that of Frank, a Black veteran of the Korean War, the second focusing on his younger sister Cee, who is subject to a eugenics experiments headed by her employer that results in her sterilization. As these story lines intersect, Morrison addresses the ties between military and reproductive violence and their ongoing legacies, ties we can still read in the anti-Black administering of police forces and medical machinations wielded against Black communities, both before and during the long reach of COVID-19.

"This is how you hustle the arcane": The Unspeakable Thing Unspoken in Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom

ASAP/Journal, 2021

my students to spend some time on the seemingly straightforward dedication: "For H. P. LOVECRAFT,... more my students to spend some time on the seemingly straightforward dedication: "For H. P. LOVECRAFT, with all my conflicted feelings." 1 If a dedication is meant to be a declaration of gratitude or perhaps an invocation of intimacy, then why the conflict? Eventually a student who is familiar with LOVECRAFT will offer the dilemma familiar to many of us who, much like LAVALLE, grew up appreciating the worlds LOVECRAFT created. The question is this: how do people of color, BIPOC writers and students, contend with the immeasurable pleasure we once

"[T]hrough some kind of veil": Queering Race and the Maternal in Patricia Powell's The Pagoda

Patricia Powell's The Pagoda, published in 1998, is an aesthetic actualization of the in-betweenn... more Patricia Powell's The Pagoda, published in 1998, is an aesthetic actualization of the in-betweenness of Jamaica's purported self-definition as diasporic, hybrid, multiple. Jamaica, as with many countries in the Caribbean that withstood and resisted their respective European colonizing nations, is a site that makes visible its histories of Indigenous servitude and genocide, the importing of African slaves and subsequent indentured laborers from Asia, and the continuous presence of hegemonic systems of repressive and ideological powers. Taking place in 1893, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire but well before Jamaican independence, Powell's novel harkens back to Olive Senior's parrot that finds itself caught between what was, what is, and the unavoidable shifts wrought by the invasion that is the British Empire (Senior 2005). Inasmuch as Senior's parrot can be read as a reflection of Jamaica's diasporic, hybrid, and multiple self-definition, I turn to Powell's characters-specifically her protagonists Lowe and Miss Sylvie-to consider what purpose such an in-between can serve. I begin by arguing for a reading of Lowe as one who brings to the forefront the tensions of colonial logic by virtue of his race, gender, and sexuality, none of which are easily categorized, or indeed, easily known. I propose that, by situating Lowe, a Chinese Jamaican, both within and outside expected codes of racialized, gendered, and sexualized behaviors, The Pagoda lays bare the ways in which colonial logic-manifesting as demands for purity and order-derails any move toward liberation. If Lowe functions as the primary conduit of this argument, I contend that Miss Sylvie, his wife, offers an alternative venue for radical possibilities that fall outside the rigid conventions of 1890s Jamaica, a Black maternal that is always already the queer maternal, what I call in this article the "Black queer maternal"-a maternal that does not rely on reproduction, either literal or figurative, as its raison d'être. Powell challenges the colonial logic of discrete identity markers and categorizations in Lowe's adopted country of residence, not to reverse it but to illuminate the unexpected possibilities that arise from the space of refusal, and the space of the diasporic, hybrid, multiple that is Jamaica. I n an interview published in Callaloo with Patricia Powell, author of The Pagoda, Faith Smith asks Powell how she situates herself within Caribbean writing. Powell's response is that, while she considers her work to be WGFC 9_1 text.indd 42 WGFC 9_1 text.indd 42 5/28/21 10:41 AM 5/28/21 10:41 AM

From Gwangju to Brixton: The Impossible Translation of Han Kang’s Human Acts

Lateral, 2020

This article theorizes the relationship between trauma and translation through a close reading of... more This article theorizes the relationship between trauma and translation through a close reading of Han Kang's Human Acts (2016) and its complex narrating of the Gwangju Democratization Movement of 1980. I engage with the novel through scholarship on state-sanctioned violence, the politics of memory and Korean and Black literary and cultural studies. I do this to consider how the massacre of Gwangu's residents by their own government is made possible by earlier histories of occupation and imperial violence in the Korean peninsula. I then turn to the Korean edition of the novel to address what emerges outside of the English translation. Here, I rely on my own language skills to read, translate and direct attention to what is lost in Deborah Smith's published translation of Han's novel. Specifically, I argue that Smith's version of Human Acts actively works against Han's subversive articulation of the elusiveness of subjectivity, the rending of the world vis-à-vis violence, the possibilities afforded by opacity and the dilemma of what it means to write about "one's own" historical trauma. In an attempt to reflect critically on what it might mean to live in the ongoing ripples of such traumas, I offer a text that blurs autobiography, travel writing, Black Studies, and literary analysis, crafting something that may be situated under the aegis of cultural studies and alongside what Gloria Anzaldúa names an autohistoria-teoría and what Crystal Baik calls a diasporic memory work.

American Studies, 2020

A Move Toward Genuine Solidarity

by Jocyl Sacramento and Yumi Pak

Ethnic Studies Review, 2020

A discussion facilitated by Jason Magabo Perez, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Californ... more A discussion facilitated by Jason Magabo Perez, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University (CSU), San Marcos. Featuring commentary and analysis of the statements of solidarity curated by Natchee Blu Barnd included in this issue. KEYWORDS activism, ethnic studies, Statements of Solidarity This historical conjuncture demands deep reflection, critical imagination, and continued action. In the midst of popular protest against continued state-sanctioned anti-Black violence; in the midst of an ongoing pandemic that is disproportionately devasting Black communities, Native communities, and poor communities of color; and in the midst of drastic shifts in the landscape of higher education, the California State Senate passed AB 1460, a bill that would make Ethnic Studies a graduation requirement at California State University. As CSU faculty, we feel it urgent to build solidarity across campuses and with local communities. Using the topic of recent solidarity statements as our point of departure, we gathered to discuss solidarity statements, activism, and the limitations and possibilities of ethnic studies at the university. What follows are excerpts from a casual conversation among five colleagues. By no means is this intended to be representative of our programs, departments , or campuses. We understand this humble effort as a beginning of a conversation, a move toward genuine solidarity.

A Move Toward Genuine Solidarity

by Yumi Pak and Leslie Quintanilla

Ethnic Studies Review, 2020

A discussion facilitated by Jason Magabo Perez, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Californ... more A discussion facilitated by Jason Magabo Perez, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University (CSU), San Marcos. This historical conjuncture demands deep reflection, critical imagination, and continued action. In the midst of popular protest against continued state-sanctioned anti-Black violence; in the midst of an ongoing pandemic that is disproportionately devasting Black communities, Native communities, and poor communities of color; and in the midst of drastic shifts in the landscape of higher education, the California State Senate passed AB 1460, a bill that would make Ethnic Studies a graduation requirement at California State University. As CSU faculty, we feel it urgent to build solidarity across campuses and with local communities. Using the topic of recent solidarity statements as our point of departure, we gathered to discuss solidarity statements, activism, and the limitations and possibilities of ethnic studies at the university. What follows are excerpts from a casual conversation among five colleagues. By no means is this intended to be representative of our programs, departments , or campuses. We understand this humble effort as a beginning of a conversation, a move toward genuine solidarity.

"'Jack Boughton Has a Wife and a Child': Generative Blackness in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Home"

This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home, 2015

Marilynne Robinson focuses the action of Gilead and Home in the small town of Gilead during the C... more Marilynne Robinson focuses the action of Gilead and Home in the small town of Gilead during the Civil Rights Era even as she relegates black history and black voices to her novels' peripheries. Blackness nonetheless lurks and frays at the edges of both narratives, at the edges of memory, remaining simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible in both John Ames's and Glory Boughton's remembering of the past. In this essay, I use Robinson's companion novels to illuminate the ways in which American society's representation of black bodies and subjectivities makes possible ways of remembering and retelling Blackness that affirm kinship between white fathers and sons and make lineage transpire between them. Robinson is not blameless of this representational strategy. She is attentive to the ways in which and the reasons why Blackness is made absent in the town of Gilead; she does not address, however, how she also utilizes that absent presence to affix genealogy to Jack and Ames, or even Jack and his biological father, but never Jack and his son.

"Say, Who Owns This House?": US Violence, Indebtedness, and Care in Toni Morrison's Home

MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2022

Whose house is this? Whose night keeps out the light In here? Say, who owns this house? It's not ... more Whose house is this? Whose night keeps out the light In here? Say, who owns this house? It's not mine. I dreamed another, sweeter, brighter With a view of lakes crossed in painted boats; Of fields wide as arms open for me. This house is strange. Its shadows lie. Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?-Toni Morrison (Home) Home (2012), Toni Morrison's tenth novel, strikes readers with its deceptive slenderness; much like the house in the epigraph, it evokes an atmosphere of nooks and crannies where shadows and truths lie, in both senses of that word. Yet, like the character Frank Money's paralyzing fugue states that dull his senses to the world, the actual heft of the novel is felt in the possibilities created by things unseen and unsaid. Taking place in the mid-1950s, the novel follows two seemingly disparate story lines, the first being that of Frank, a Black veteran of the Korean War, the second focusing on his younger sister Cee, who is subject to a eugenics experiments headed by her employer that results in her sterilization. As these story lines intersect, Morrison addresses the ties between military and reproductive violence and their ongoing legacies, ties we can still read in the anti-Black administering of police forces and medical machinations wielded against Black communities, both before and during the long reach of COVID-19.

"This is how you hustle the arcane": The Unspeakable Thing Unspoken in Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom

ASAP/Journal, 2021

my students to spend some time on the seemingly straightforward dedication: "For H. P. LOVECRAFT,... more my students to spend some time on the seemingly straightforward dedication: "For H. P. LOVECRAFT, with all my conflicted feelings." 1 If a dedication is meant to be a declaration of gratitude or perhaps an invocation of intimacy, then why the conflict? Eventually a student who is familiar with LOVECRAFT will offer the dilemma familiar to many of us who, much like LAVALLE, grew up appreciating the worlds LOVECRAFT created. The question is this: how do people of color, BIPOC writers and students, contend with the immeasurable pleasure we once

"[T]hrough some kind of veil": Queering Race and the Maternal in Patricia Powell's The Pagoda

Patricia Powell's The Pagoda, published in 1998, is an aesthetic actualization of the in-betweenn... more Patricia Powell's The Pagoda, published in 1998, is an aesthetic actualization of the in-betweenness of Jamaica's purported self-definition as diasporic, hybrid, multiple. Jamaica, as with many countries in the Caribbean that withstood and resisted their respective European colonizing nations, is a site that makes visible its histories of Indigenous servitude and genocide, the importing of African slaves and subsequent indentured laborers from Asia, and the continuous presence of hegemonic systems of repressive and ideological powers. Taking place in 1893, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire but well before Jamaican independence, Powell's novel harkens back to Olive Senior's parrot that finds itself caught between what was, what is, and the unavoidable shifts wrought by the invasion that is the British Empire (Senior 2005). Inasmuch as Senior's parrot can be read as a reflection of Jamaica's diasporic, hybrid, and multiple self-definition, I turn to Powell's characters-specifically her protagonists Lowe and Miss Sylvie-to consider what purpose such an in-between can serve. I begin by arguing for a reading of Lowe as one who brings to the forefront the tensions of colonial logic by virtue of his race, gender, and sexuality, none of which are easily categorized, or indeed, easily known. I propose that, by situating Lowe, a Chinese Jamaican, both within and outside expected codes of racialized, gendered, and sexualized behaviors, The Pagoda lays bare the ways in which colonial logic-manifesting as demands for purity and order-derails any move toward liberation. If Lowe functions as the primary conduit of this argument, I contend that Miss Sylvie, his wife, offers an alternative venue for radical possibilities that fall outside the rigid conventions of 1890s Jamaica, a Black maternal that is always already the queer maternal, what I call in this article the "Black queer maternal"-a maternal that does not rely on reproduction, either literal or figurative, as its raison d'être. Powell challenges the colonial logic of discrete identity markers and categorizations in Lowe's adopted country of residence, not to reverse it but to illuminate the unexpected possibilities that arise from the space of refusal, and the space of the diasporic, hybrid, multiple that is Jamaica. I n an interview published in Callaloo with Patricia Powell, author of The Pagoda, Faith Smith asks Powell how she situates herself within Caribbean writing. Powell's response is that, while she considers her work to be WGFC 9_1 text.indd 42 WGFC 9_1 text.indd 42 5/28/21 10:41 AM 5/28/21 10:41 AM

From Gwangju to Brixton: The Impossible Translation of Han Kang’s Human Acts

Lateral, 2020

This article theorizes the relationship between trauma and translation through a close reading of... more This article theorizes the relationship between trauma and translation through a close reading of Han Kang's Human Acts (2016) and its complex narrating of the Gwangju Democratization Movement of 1980. I engage with the novel through scholarship on state-sanctioned violence, the politics of memory and Korean and Black literary and cultural studies. I do this to consider how the massacre of Gwangu's residents by their own government is made possible by earlier histories of occupation and imperial violence in the Korean peninsula. I then turn to the Korean edition of the novel to address what emerges outside of the English translation. Here, I rely on my own language skills to read, translate and direct attention to what is lost in Deborah Smith's published translation of Han's novel. Specifically, I argue that Smith's version of Human Acts actively works against Han's subversive articulation of the elusiveness of subjectivity, the rending of the world vis-à-vis violence, the possibilities afforded by opacity and the dilemma of what it means to write about "one's own" historical trauma. In an attempt to reflect critically on what it might mean to live in the ongoing ripples of such traumas, I offer a text that blurs autobiography, travel writing, Black Studies, and literary analysis, crafting something that may be situated under the aegis of cultural studies and alongside what Gloria Anzaldúa names an autohistoria-teoría and what Crystal Baik calls a diasporic memory work.

American Studies, 2020

A Move Toward Genuine Solidarity

by Jocyl Sacramento and Yumi Pak

Ethnic Studies Review, 2020

A discussion facilitated by Jason Magabo Perez, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Californ... more A discussion facilitated by Jason Magabo Perez, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University (CSU), San Marcos. Featuring commentary and analysis of the statements of solidarity curated by Natchee Blu Barnd included in this issue. KEYWORDS activism, ethnic studies, Statements of Solidarity This historical conjuncture demands deep reflection, critical imagination, and continued action. In the midst of popular protest against continued state-sanctioned anti-Black violence; in the midst of an ongoing pandemic that is disproportionately devasting Black communities, Native communities, and poor communities of color; and in the midst of drastic shifts in the landscape of higher education, the California State Senate passed AB 1460, a bill that would make Ethnic Studies a graduation requirement at California State University. As CSU faculty, we feel it urgent to build solidarity across campuses and with local communities. Using the topic of recent solidarity statements as our point of departure, we gathered to discuss solidarity statements, activism, and the limitations and possibilities of ethnic studies at the university. What follows are excerpts from a casual conversation among five colleagues. By no means is this intended to be representative of our programs, departments , or campuses. We understand this humble effort as a beginning of a conversation, a move toward genuine solidarity.

A Move Toward Genuine Solidarity

by Yumi Pak and Leslie Quintanilla

Ethnic Studies Review, 2020

A discussion facilitated by Jason Magabo Perez, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Californ... more A discussion facilitated by Jason Magabo Perez, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University (CSU), San Marcos. This historical conjuncture demands deep reflection, critical imagination, and continued action. In the midst of popular protest against continued state-sanctioned anti-Black violence; in the midst of an ongoing pandemic that is disproportionately devasting Black communities, Native communities, and poor communities of color; and in the midst of drastic shifts in the landscape of higher education, the California State Senate passed AB 1460, a bill that would make Ethnic Studies a graduation requirement at California State University. As CSU faculty, we feel it urgent to build solidarity across campuses and with local communities. Using the topic of recent solidarity statements as our point of departure, we gathered to discuss solidarity statements, activism, and the limitations and possibilities of ethnic studies at the university. What follows are excerpts from a casual conversation among five colleagues. By no means is this intended to be representative of our programs, departments , or campuses. We understand this humble effort as a beginning of a conversation, a move toward genuine solidarity.

"'Jack Boughton Has a Wife and a Child': Generative Blackness in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Home"

This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home, 2015

Marilynne Robinson focuses the action of Gilead and Home in the small town of Gilead during the C... more Marilynne Robinson focuses the action of Gilead and Home in the small town of Gilead during the Civil Rights Era even as she relegates black history and black voices to her novels' peripheries. Blackness nonetheless lurks and frays at the edges of both narratives, at the edges of memory, remaining simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible in both John Ames's and Glory Boughton's remembering of the past. In this essay, I use Robinson's companion novels to illuminate the ways in which American society's representation of black bodies and subjectivities makes possible ways of remembering and retelling Blackness that affirm kinship between white fathers and sons and make lineage transpire between them. Robinson is not blameless of this representational strategy. She is attentive to the ways in which and the reasons why Blackness is made absent in the town of Gilead; she does not address, however, how she also utilizes that absent presence to affix genealogy to Jack and Ames, or even Jack and his biological father, but never Jack and his son.