• The Southeast Asian review
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.31-72
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• 2010

This study is to explain the nature of transnational activities being involved in by Filipina intermarriage migrants in Korea by examining the institutional backgrounds of market, society and the state. The increasing number of Filipina intermarriage with Korean coincides with the advance of liberal market economy, which governs internal and bilateral interactions between and among the three institutions in both countries. While existing various reasons for engaging in intermarriage, a significant number of Filipina wives in Korea ventured into it with uncertain expectations that they might earn better lives and could support their families. Such hopes usually turn out in vain when they meet the real lives in Korea. It is mainly because their spouses in Korea would rather be those who left behind in the marriage market due to their lack of competitiveness. Filipina wives are also suffering from social isolation caused by language and other barriers such as family relations or rural life they might settle in. Their transnational activities usually tend to be their effort to breakthrough their unexpected condition of difficult lives in Korea. They usually make use of transnational sort of community activities to cultivate chances to engage in bread earning activity. Migrant's transnational activity has a great impact on sociocultural changes in the country of origin and of arrival. Transnational activity provides migrants with economic opportunities, and uplifts self-esteem as well. Intermarriage couples, especially with Southeast Asian wives, and their offsprings show a tendency of downward assimilation to Korean society. Korean state policy toward them should not simply apply undiscriminated assimilation theory, but take into account their possible strength of transnational identity with which they could find a means to integrate themselves successfully into the mainstream Korean society.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.203-222
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• 2013

This study has been implemented under the two purposes. One is to critically explore how married immigrant women had experienced or experience conflicts, differentiation and so on occurred in their relations to family, neighbor, friend, organization and nation. The other is to understand married immigrant women and family through a new perspective based on a relational space of interacting trans-nation, local and nation. The results of the study are summarized as the followings. Firstly, transnational space is produced by international marriage between Korean man and foreign woman and kept (or activated ) by (non) everyday activities of married immigrant women and family. There are remittance, children's rearing and education, visits to mother's house, emotional interactions by phone and computer and so on. Secondly, multi-layered and relational local spaces have been (re)produced by married immigrant women's various activities related to family, neighbor, friend, nation and so on. Thirdly, married immigrant women's relations to nation state or government has been specifically presented (or expressed) through the acquiring of Korean nationality and government's activities of supporting multicultural family. Married immigrant women feel that their national identity between mother's nation and Korea is ambiguous and undecided.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.70
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• pp.66-94
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• 2015

Postcolonialism, as a school of thought, has become enormously influential for understanding the recent phenomena of globalization. While rejecting the universalizing categories of the Enlightenment, postcolonialism has called into question the old idea of culture and identity as a transcendent regime of authenticity and purity. It has also celebrated the diasporic experiences that entail porous and hybrid cultural identities as a potential site of struggle and resistance against the dominant cultural and discursive order. It is argued, however, that postcolonial theory's emancipatory claims relating to the diversified global culture tend to be complicit with transnational capitalism that brings about global issues of material as well as cultural injustice. This article, through a thorough review of the ways the postcolonial theoretical framework has been developed and appropriated by main figures in postcolonial scholarship, seeks for a theoretical and critical strategy to grasp the complex conditions of global inequality.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.149-167
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• 2008

Korea has persisted in the notion of "ethnic nationalism." That is "one race, one people, one language" as a homogeneous entity. This social ideal of unity prevails, even in overseas Korean communities formed by voluntary and involuntary displacement in the turmoil of modern history: communities made intermittent with the Japanese colonial occupation and with postcolonial encounters with the West. Given that the Korean people suffered from the trauma of deprivation of the language caused by the loss of the nation, nation has been equated with the language. Accordingly, "these bearers of a homeland" are also firm Korean language holders. The linguistic patriotism of unity based on the intertwining of "mother tongue" and "father country" has become prevalent in the collective memory of the people of the Korean diaspora. Korean American literature has grappled with this concept of the national history of Korea and the Korean language. The aesthetics of Korean American literature has been marked by an influx of literary resources of 'Korea' in sensibilities and structure of feelings; Korean myth, folk lore, songs, humor, traditional stories, manners, customs and historic moments. An experimental use of the Korean alphabet, Hangeul, written down as pronounced, provides an ethnic flavor in the midst of the English texts. Despite its national framework of mind, however, Korean American literature as an interstitial art reveals a keen awareness of inbetweenness, and transnational hybrid identities. By exploring the complex interrelationships of cultural and linguistic boundary-crossing practices in Korean American literature, this paper argues that the poetics of the Korean diaspora challenges the closed structure of identity formation, and offers a transnational sphere to deconstruct a rigidly demarcated national ideology of "one race, one people, one language," for the world literary history.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.1089-1109
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• 2011

In an attempt to demonstrate in context of Nietzsche's "overman" (ubermensch) and Heidegger's "Being-in-the-World" (Dasein) the collective human efforts to overcome humanism in crisis, I will provide the ground for the poetics of overcoming, the ground which are based upon the double movements of transhumanism and transnationalism. For this purpose, I will turn to the theories of two distinctive poets who reveal and disreveal their truths about the subjecthood or the subjectivity in terms of overcoming: Christopher Dewdney for posthuman transhumanity and Dionisio D. Martinez for transnational cultural contamination Transhumanism represented by Christopher Dewdney manifests an interfusion of outside and inside, thereby collapsing the boundary between the mind and the world, and provides a breakthrough from the limitedly defined mind to the transhuman perspective of overcoming by using terminalogy and techniques from science and technology. The emerging transhumanism reflects the growing interdependence between humans and bio technologies, and suggests a potential improvement of human beings. The main argument of transhumanism is that we humans can and should continue to develop in all possible directions, by overcoming our human limitations by shedding the body and having the disembodied consciousness which will liberate our mind. Kwame Anthony Appiah's "cultural contamination" is another form of overcoming as well as a way to otherness, a counter-ideal of cultural purity which sustains authentic culture, reversing the traditional binary opposition between enriching authenticity and threatening hybridization. Dionisio Martinez's poetry sublimates the negative side of Appiah's concept of contamination, by redeeming the value of the Appiah's list of the ideal of contamination such as hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. When a poetic subject is doubly exiled and doubly homeless away from his/her native homeland and home of native language, one has no more identification with the authentic culture of both home and away, but rather anticipates a new identity as a transnational subject to cross the bridge beyond cultural authenticity and to enter into the field of cultural contamination.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.180-194
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• 2016

The local identity of a female marriage migrant is not fixed to certain boundary or location, but rather comprised flexibly according to geographical movement or new settlement to different place. This research focuses on the local identity and life change of female marriage migrants that are constituted/reconstituted according to spatial transition, or migration. The analysis was conducted to find out traits of changes in the periods of migration and settlement based on the following categorization: multiculturalism and bicultural identity, assimilation and host country identity, exclusion and origin country identity, marginalization and marginal identity. The results are as follows; while having identical experience in terms of a migration, the local identities of marriage migrant women differed according to individual/regional characteristics as well as their respective roles within those traits. In addition, most of females showed passivity in maintaining and exposing their cultural identities of original states. Moreover the life satisfaction change of female marriage migrant that is type of assililation and host country identity is appeared more than others. through this assimilation and accommodation mean adaptation to female marriage migrant lived in Korea. However the intercultural competences of both marriage migrant woman and children in multicultural families facilitate the connection among different cultures. Based on these outcomes, with the transition to multicultural society and space, this research proposes the necessity of fostering global citizenship for mutual recognition of each culture, thus enabling coexistence.

• American Studies
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.25-56
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• 2020

The essay examines two contemporary American plays that portray adult Korean American adoptees' return to South Korea: How to Be a Korean Woman (2012) by Sunmee Chomet and Middle Brother (2014) by Eric Sharp. While the existing scholarship on transnational adoption has discussed homecoming as a predominantly female experience of birth mothers and daughters, Chomet and Sharp suggest the differing ways in which the adoptee subjectivity is re-imagined in particularly gendered ways after homecoming. In these plays, adult adoptees' repeated, mundane bodily performances of Korean cultural norms illustrate how notions of femininity and masculinity are inscribed onto the body of adoptee individuals under the patriarchal system. Such performative construction of Korean-ness departs from the earlier theatrical representations of young, adolescent adoptees' homecoming that served as a symbolic rite of passage, a necessary process through which they would gain cultural hybridity and mature into cosmopolitan American-ness.

• American Studies
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.99-131
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• 2018

The United States of America is privileged in that social stratification is not directly linked to the division of powers. Nonetheless, America endured the devastating Civil War only to consolidate her national identity when a nation was not defined. In fact, state governments preexisted as a sovereign long before the federal government came into existence as a national government. As a consequence, intergovernmental relations have persistently been contested long after the Civil War ended. In contrast, the European Union was founded on the political will to establish regional integration such that her member states would never repeat the bloodshed in catastrophic wars. Since the principle of subsidiarity precipitated political endeavor in regional integration, the EU developed into a bifurcated system of transnational and international organizations. In this paper, I evaluate the US and the EU by applying the perspective of federalism in which separation and integration are perennially at tension.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.115-146
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• 2024

Southeast Asian detective stories and their scholarships have shown new understandings of justice and identity in this region. This study on Vietnamese detective stories in the early twenty-first century contributes to post-colonial discourses to reflect how colonial structures were constructed and reconstructed from the past until now. Starting with transnational characters and contexts, we demonstrate the subversion revealed in the way the perpetrator-victim are transposed and their motivations for the crimes. The Vietnamese detective novelists adjust the conventions of detective stories to address these issues of law, ethics, and truth that arise in the post-colonial context. These multidimensional narratives of crime and justice also serve as resistance to the grand narratives of power that have dominated Vietnam for years.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.62 no.3
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• pp.323-351
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• 2010

Through the biographical approach, the current research purports to reconstruct the Changeprocess of values and identities on the lives of the first-generation Korean-German females in Germany from the transnational perspective. Ten interviews were conducted, using Schutze's autobiographicalnarrative interview. Interview data were analyzed through the application of Schutze's autobiographical-narrative interview and Mayring's qualitative content analysis. Findings showed that on the onset of emigration, their values centered around hybrid collectivism. Their life in the process of emigration was characteristic of a shift to hybrid individualism. Furthermore, the life at beginning of emigration was found to be characterized by a singular regional identity. The process of emigration was shown to mark the conversion into dual identity, dual regional and dual national. Some theoretical and practical suggestions for the emigrants' welfare were finally offered that were associated with the process of values and identities changes in their life.