• Title/Summary/Keyword: Korea Diaspora

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The Ethics of the Othering in the Era of Transnationalism

  • Kim, Youngmin
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.55 no.6
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    • pp.1013-1034
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    • 2009
  • The space of the Other assumes the space of Barthes's multiplicity and Foucault's transdiscursive position, and, therefore, aims at becoming the locus in which the speaking subject and the hearing subjects are supposed to communicate and constitute as if they were situated in the pscychoanalytic session. However, the wall of untranslatibility across language and cultures still exist there in the space of the Other in the form of trauma and aggressivity, as Lacan demonstrate perceptively through the reading of Kant avec Sade. In short, Lacan regards the moral commandment (to love one's neighbor as oneself) as the obstacle in the Freud's myth of transgression, and interprets this in terms of the emergence of the Other. Freud understands that the aggressivity in the subject's own heart was inherent in all humans, and that one's neighbor would be evil. Lacan goes beyond Freud and articulates that the aggressivity in the imaginary relation with the Other in the mirror stage insures that an evil inheres in the very being of humanity. A global phenomenon of the diasporic identities and hybridity, the phenomenon which has been represented by the complicated intermixture of terms which span from diaspora, postcolonialism, postnationalism. and transnationalism can be clarified, if they are put in the context of the ethics of Othering or becoming the Other. The ethics of Othering presupposes the situation in which the diasporic subjects encounter the lack of the cross-cultural negotiation and communication. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the poetics of Other and the logic of the ethics of Othering can explain the postmodern or transmodern world which has become deterritorialized, diasporic, and transnational as well as how one can encounter the results of diasporic and postcolonial double consciousness, a consciousness which is a discursive category for multicultural or cross-cultural, focusing on the concept of liminality/interstitiality

History, Trauma, and Motherhood in a Korean Adoptee Narrative: Marie Myung-Ok Lee's Somebody's Daughter

  • Koo, Eunsook
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.55 no.6
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    • pp.1035-1056
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    • 2009
  • Korean adoptee narratives have proliferated over the last ten years as adopted Koreans have begun to represent their own experiences of violent dislocation, displacement and loss in various forms of literary and artistic works, including poems, autobiographical works, novels, documentaries and films. These narratives by Korean adoptees have intervened in the current diaspora discourse to question further the traditional categories of race, ethnicity, culture and nation by representing the unique experiences of the forced and involuntary migration of adopted Koreans. For a long time, the adoption discourse has been mostly constructed from the perspectives of adoptive parents. Therefore the voice of adoptees as well as that of the birth mothers have not been properly heard or represented in adoption discourse. According to Hosu Kim, the U. S. adoption discourse, feeling pressured to deal with the stigma of the commodification of children, changed from viewing the adoptees as children who had been rescued from poverty and abandonment to considering them as a gift from the birth mothers. With the emergence of the gift rhetoric in transnational adoption, the birth mothers erased from adoption discourse have begun to be acknowledged as one of the central characters in the adoption triad. If Korean adoptees are the "the ghostly children of Korean history," the birth mothers are their "ghostly doubles" who "bear the mark of a repressed national trauma." Somebody's Daughter represents the female experiences of becoming an adopted child and of being a birth mother. In particular, the novel makes a birth mother, the forgotten presence in adoptee narratives, into a central figure in the triangular relationship created by international adoption. The novel historicizes the experiences of a Korean adoptee growing up in America as well as those of a mother who had suffered silently from feelings of unbearable loss, guilt, grief and from unforgettable memories. In addition, narrating the birth mother's story is a way to give humanity back to these forgotten women in Korean adoption history. Revisiting the site of loss both for a mother and a daughter through the novel is an act of collective mourning. The narratives about and by Korean adoptees force Korean intellectuals to reflect seriously upon Korean society and its underlying ideology which prevents a woman from mothering her own baby, and to take an ethical and political stand on this current social and political issue.

Empirical Research on Security Awareness of Multicultural Family Marriage Migrant Women

  • Park, Kap Lyong
    • Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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    • v.20 no.10
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    • pp.141-148
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    • 2015
  • This study aims to inspect national security consciousness of marriage migrant women, and to figure out factors which affect on awareness of national security. Based on this, this study also suggests a way to build up national security of marriage migrant women. As the result of the factors on security situation, there were several things which are necessity of education, trust in the army and government, positivity toward North Korea and so on, while necessity of education, trust in the army and government, national pride and positivity toward North Korea were on the awareness of national security. There are three ways of building up national security consciousness of marriage migrant women. First, security education is needed to be in the social adjustment program of marriage migrant women. Secondly, concern on security is required to them. Third, a necessity of production on security education material is demanded for marriage migrant women.

Mapping Philippine Studies in North East Asia: A SWOT Analysis of Southeast Asian Studies Programs from China, Japan, and Korea

  • Laranjo, Ronel O.
    • SUVANNABHUMI
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    • v.12 no.1
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    • pp.111-130
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    • 2020
  • This paper introduces the different Southeast Asian Studies academic programs of three universities in northeast Asia namely: Peking University (China); Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Japan); and Busan University of Foreign Studies (Korea). This study mainly focuses on the Philippines as part of Southeast Asian studies program in the said universities. The researcher utilized archival work related to the Southeast Asian studies programs of each university. The study also examined the curriculum of the program, background of faculty, and motivations of students in studying Southeast Asian studies by conducting interviews and surveys. Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT) Analysis was employed by the researcher in analyzing the data from the different universities. Finally, in mapping out the teaching of Filipino language and Philippine-related subjects, this paper argued that Northeast Asian universities established a Southeast Asian Studies focused on Philippines because of various socio-economic-political factors, and not only because of the Filipino diaspora in the region.

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Art of Dislocation, Exile, and Diaspora: Korean Artists in New York in the 1960s and 1970s (1960-70년대 뉴욕의 한국작가: 이주, 망명, 디아스포라의 미술)

  • Yang, Eunhee
    • The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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    • no.16
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    • pp.107-137
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    • 2013
  • This paper examines a number of Korean artists-Whanki Kim, Po Kim, Byungki Kim, Lim Choong-Sup, Min Byung-Ok and etc-working in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on their motivations to head for the U.S. and their life and activity in the newly-emerged city of international art. The thesis was conceived based upon the fact that New York has been one of the major venues for Korean artists in which to live, study, travel and stay after the Korean War. Moreover, the United States, since 1945, has had a tremendous influence upon Korea politically, socially, economically, and, above all, culturally. This study is divided into three major sections. The first one attends to the reasons that these artists moved out of Korea while including in this discussion, the long-standing yearning of the Korean intelligentsia to experience more modernized cultures, and American postwar cultural policies that stimulated them to envision life beyond their national parameters, in a country heavily entrenched in Cold War ideology. The second part examines these artists' pursuit of abstraction in New York where it was already losing its avant-garde status as opposed to the style's cutting edge cache in Korea. While their turn to abstraction was outdated from New York's critical perspective, it was seen to be de rigueur for Koreans that had developed through phases from Art Informel in the 1960s to Dansaekhwa (monochromatic paintings) in the 1970s. The third part focuses on the artists' struggle while caught between a dualistic framework such as Korea/U.S, East/West, center/margin, traditional/modern, and abstraction/figuration. Despite such dichotomic frames, they identified abstract art as the epitome of pure, absolute art, which revealed their beliefs inherited from western modernism during the colonial period before 1910-1945. In fact, their reality as immigrants in America put them in a diasporic space where they oscillated between the fixed, essentialist Korean identity and the floating, transforming identity as international artists in New York or Korean-American artists. Thus their abstract and semi-abstract art reflect the in-between identity from the diasporic space while demonstrating their yearning for a land of political freedom, intellectual fulfillment and the continuity of modern art's legacy imposed upon them over the course of Korea's tumultuous history in the twentieth century and making the artists as precursor of transnational, transcultural art of the global age in the twenty-first century.

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Between Philippine Studies and Filipino-American Studies: The Transpacific as an Area and the Transformation of Area Studies in the 21st Century

  • Nolasco, Janus Isaac
    • SUVANNABHUMI
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    • v.10 no.2
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    • pp.89-114
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    • 2018
  • In this paper, I argue that while area studies in the United States has declined since the end of the Cold War, its area impulse of has emerged in other fields of inquiry, particularly Asian-American Studies. Accordingly, I explain how the collective reflections of Filipino-American scholars on empire, migration, diaspora, and identity point to the consolidation and viability of the transpacific as an area, which spans both the United States and the Philippines. Addressing several problems with this straddling-mainly as criticisms of Filipino-American Studies-I show how the transpacific serves as a bridge between Philippine Studies and Filipino-American Studies, and helps define the boundaries and overlaps between both fields of inquiry.

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Marriage Migrants' representation in Korean Cinema

  • de Dios, Ines Miranda
    • Asia-pacific Journal of Multimedia Services Convergent with Art, Humanities, and Sociology
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    • v.8 no.11
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    • pp.31-40
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    • 2018
  • This paper studies how marriage migrants are being depicted in Korean Cinema. In the recent years, the foreign population in South Korea has been increasing and so has done the presence of migrant minorities in media, including cinema. This study discusses that korean cinema shows dominant ideologies of power in Korean society where marriage migrants are located at the bottom. Five films were analyzed and from this analysis five frames were extracted. Marriage migrants are frequently depicted as subordinated or powerless, they are usually women in the role of wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law, they are treated as ethnic others, sexualized others or commodities. Consequently, their relationships with Korean nationals are formed by power relations. Moreover, Korean national who do establish some sort of intimate relationship with the marriage migrants are represented as people in the margins of Korean society. In this way, it is reinforced the social position of marriage migrants as outsiders in the Korean society.

Bad Subjects and the Transnational Minjung: The Poetry of Jason Koo and Ed Bok Lee

  • Grotjohn, Robert
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.64 no.3
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    • pp.307-327
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    • 2018
  • In light of Korean inclusion of its diaspora as part of the nation, a "creolized" approach that brings together constructions of the bad subject of Asian American studies with conceptions of the Korean minjung grounds an analysis of two poets as they might be considered from a bi-national, Korean and U.S. American, perspective. The poets Ed Bok Lee and Jason Koo show different ways of being the bad subject. Lee is clearly a bad American subject, resisting American white racial hegemony, and his poetry often addresses a kind of American minjung multiculturalism, as is shown in poems from his first two books Real Karaoke People and Whorled. He challenges some aspects of contemporary Korea, and might be a kind of Korean bad subject in those challenges. Koo, on the other hand, resists the call to bad subjectivity, so that his poetry may not fit the preferred paradigm of Asian American studies, as he recognizes. As he resists that paradigm, he also gives little attention to his Korean heritage, so his not-bad American subjectivity becomes bad Korea subjectivity. He recovers some measure of badness in the final poem of Man on Extremely Small Island when he connects briefly to his Korean heritage and his Asian American present. The creolized juxtaposition of the bad subject with the minjung suggests the use of these poems in considering both American and Korean society.

A Proposal Based on the Analysis of Each Party Election Pledge Related to Korean migrant workers (한국 이주노동자에 대한 각 정당 선거공약 분석과 제언)

  • Yoon, Miral;Lee, Chun Ho
    • Asia-pacific Journal of Multimedia Services Convergent with Art, Humanities, and Sociology
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    • v.8 no.10
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    • pp.883-893
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    • 2018
  • The inflow of Labor Migrants has been grown up to 600,000 people until now with the adoption of Employment Permit System (EPS) in 2004 until now. However the institutional support lack to ensure their rights and improve their conditions. This is because of their consideration ad temporary labors in South Korean society and labor forces rather than the objects of integration. As a result, the legal status and rights of migrant workers are criticized for their utilization rather than human rights, and human rights protection is insufficient. To this context, this paper analyzed the 19th presidential election pledge of the four political parties (Democratic Party, the Liberty Korea Party, Bareun Party and Justice Party) the majority of the Korean National Assembly, and predicted how the policies of migrant workers would evolve. The study found that there were two political parties that did not mention policies for migrant workers, and the remaining two parties also maintained their current policies. This is probably the biggest reason to recognize migrant workers as temporary residents. However, they should also be aware of the fact, that migrant workers are the members of the Korean society and are the owners of human rights that should be guaranteed, and should consider the policy directions to live with them.

Construction of Cham Identity in Cambodia

  • Maunati, Yekti;Sari, Betti Rosita
    • SUVANNABHUMI
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    • v.6 no.1
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    • pp.107-135
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    • 2014
  • Cham identities which are socially constructed and multilayered, display their markers in a variety of elements, including homeland attachment to the former Kingdom of Champa, religion, language and cultural traditions, to mention a few. However, unlike other contemporary diasporic experience which binds the homeland and the host country, the Cham diaspora in Cambodia has a unique pattern as it seems to have no voice in the political and economic spheres in Vietnam, its homeland. The relations between the Cham in Cambodia and Vietnam seem to be limited to cultural heritages such as Cham musical traditions, traditional clothing, and the architectural heritage. Many Cham people have established networks outside Cambodia with areas of the Muslim world, like Malaysia, Indonesia, southern Thailand and the Middle Eastern countries. Pursuing education or training in Islam as well as working in those countries, especially Malaysia has become a way for the Cham to widen their networks and increase their knowledge of particularly, Islam. Returning to Cambodia, these people become religious teachers or ustadz (Islamic teachers in the pondok [Islamic boarding school]). This has developed slowly, side by side with the formation of their identity as Cham Muslims. Among certain Cham, the absence of an ancient cultural heritage as an identity marker has been replaced by the Islamic culture as the important element of identity. However, being Cham is not a single identity, it is fluid and contested. Many scholars argue that the Cham in Cambodia constitute three groups: the Cham Chvea, Cham, and Cham Bani (Cham Jahed). The so-called Cham Jahed has a unique practice of Islam. Unlike other Cham who pray five times a day, Cham Jahed people pray, once a week, on Fridays. They also have a different ritual for the wedding ceremony which they regard as the authentic tradition of the Cham. Indeed, they consider themselves pure descendants of the Cham in Vietnam; retaining Cham traditions and tending to maintain their relationship with their fellow Cham in Central Vietnam. In terms of language, another marker of identity, the Cham and the Cham Jahed share the same language, but Cham Jahed preserve the written Cham script more often than the Cham. Besides, the Cham Jahed teaches the language to the young generation intensively. This paper, based on fieldwork in Cambodia in 2010 and 2011 will focus on the process of the formation of the Cham identity, especially of those called Cham and Cham Jahed.

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