Overview
Bonnie Yonbom Chung is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, where she also holds the Zhu Family Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities. Her dissertation, “The Asian Diaspora’s Polyphonic Archive: Articulating the Islands of East Asia,” theorizes the archipelagic, polyphonic, and transpacific turns in contemporary Asian American literature. Drawing on global Anglophone critique, the dissertation explores the evolving genealogy of the “East Asian Anglophone Archive” and contrasts it to the Asian diaspora's "polyphonic archive.” It argues that through polyphony Asian American and Asian diasporic writers critique the structures of Cold War internationalism and authoritarian nation-building in the Asia-Pacific.
Bonnie’s research has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Asian American Studies, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. Each of these articles presents a comparative analysis of diasporic Asian writing and incorporates Caribbean literatures or methods to examine texts such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl, and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea. She also has forthcoming publications that build on her theorization of polyphony through broader comparisons.
Research Focus
- Contemporary Global Anglophone
- Asian American literature
- Caribbean literature
- Postcolonialism
- Historical fiction