Against Visual Racialization: Sensory Ethics in Anna Kim’s A Certain Child’s Story

초록

This paper analyzes the racist classifications and the politics of visibility operating in multicultural society through Anna Kim’s novel A Certain Child’s Story (2022) and explores the possibility of a sensory turn beyond a vision-centered epistemology. Through two non-white characters—Danny, who lives in the 1950s, and Fran, who inhabits the present—the novel illuminates how racially discriminatory structures persist despite society’s ostensible commitment to diversity. This paper first examines how the Bureau of Social Welfare’s reports and Winkle’s records reduce Danny to a racial type, and how Joan’s gaze extends such othering into intimate relationships, showing that visibility functions as a form of violence that fixes identity within a single imposed meaning. Reading Fran’s sensory transformation alongside Levinas, Butler, and Merleau-Ponty, the paper then argues that tactile cognition enables an ethical encounter with the Other, and that Sylvia’s gaze, converted into touch, illustrates how relation rather than classification can constitute a multicultural ethics.

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