Emily Kim

Emily Kim is a fourth-year English and Communications double major. Her departmental honors thesis explores how post-colonial theories of hybridity illuminate new ways of understanding mixedness, specifically in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer. Emily presents a reading of The Sympathizer that reads mixedness – defined as the quality of being multiracial – as a mode that enables the unnamed Vietnamese and white narrator to move through multidimensional physical, intertextual, chronological, and embodied liminal spaces. In doing so, the text disrupts simple binary characterizations of mixed identities, as well as rejects the post-racial idealization of mixed identities as bridges to world peace by complicating and conveying the difficulties of inhabiting these liminal spaces. Through her research, Emily hopes to create new readings of mixed Asian literary figures that avoid clinicalizing or co-opting mixed race, but instead explore literary mixedness as deserving of its own analysis – an analysis that considers the complexities and lived experiences of being mixed.