The gendered contours of North Korean Migration: sexualized bodies and the violence of phenotypical normalization in South Korea

This article examines the gendered and sexualized contours of North Korean experiences in South Korea at a time when nearly 70% of the North Korean emigrants are women. South Korean television shows – e.g. reality programs – and marriage matchmaking organizations seek to portray North Korean women in a ‘positive’ way to the South Korean public, although, as this article will illustrate, these representations are of a very particular, sexualized kind. These representations are sometimes negative, and there is stigma attached to North Korean women, in which South Koreans assume, for example, that they are victims of human trafficking or that they have had relations with Chinese men during their migration. Furthermore, poor nutrition and other forms of structural violence in North Korea have molded North Korean bodies; there are often physical disparities between North and South Koreans. In South Korean society where short height is viewed as undesirable and where idealized, surgical notions of beauty dominate, the violence of gendered phenotypical normalization mark North Korean bodies as smaller, foreign, and strange. Based on ethnographic research in South Korea, this article argues that these gendered contours of North Korean migration amount to a different sort of structural violence in South Korea.     

“Call to Home?” Race,Region, and Migration to the U.S. South, 1970–20001

This research examines recent migration patterns of native‐born blacks and whites to the U.S. South. Our primary research questions concern race and regional migration dynamics, and whether new insights into such can be gleaned by comparing migrants to the South with persons moving within the non‐South. Using samples of 1970–2000 census data, we focus on race differences in the tendency to choose the South as a migration destination, and whether whites and blacks differ in key selection mechanisms shaping movement to different regional destinations. We observe increasing rates of black (compared to white) migration to the South. Additionally, patterns of selectivity within this growing African‐American migration stream are especially dramatic when southern migrants are compared to persons moving within the non‐South. Our analyses also show that black migrants are targeting particular parts of the South (e.g., states where blacks are a larger share of the population), suggesting that future research should disaggregate the “Census South” region to provide a more comprehensive picture of contemporary interregional migration in the United States.     

Living with uncertainty: disappearing modernities and polluted urbanity in post‐2000 Harare,Zimbabwe

Most studies of Zimbabwean migration and the country’s politico‐economic crisis focus on the material aspects of these two issues. In this article, through dual‐sited ethnographic work, I illustrate the symbolisms and meanings that are entangled within political and economic decline in urban Zimbabwe. Using data from fieldwork in Zimbabwe and South Africa, I argue that ‘crisis’ has carried with it a re‐configuration of the meanings associated with urbanity. This leads to a contradiction between how the state and citizens view ‘proper’ modernity. In combination with political factors, the state’s attempts to maintain modernity have led to a paradigm of pollution being associated with poor urbanites. This symbolism and its correspondent reality were found to have influenced the migration of informants in South Africa. It is thus not only economic and political relations that are at stake in present‐day Zimbabwe.     

Place,people and processes in waste theory: a global South critique

Scholars across the humanities and social sciences have long sought to theorize waste, and more particularly the relationship between humans – their history, society, culture, art and thought – and their discards. My contention, though, is that these theories, since Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966) and Thompson’s Rubbish Theory (1979), have been predominantly based in and on global North contexts and, concomitantly, have taken as their axiom the distance between our cultures, lives, experiences and our material rejects. By intersecting existing cultural theories of waste with two important emerging schools of thought – environmental justice and new materialism – I argue that the exclusion or side-lining of places, notably in the global South where countless people live on a day-to-day basis with, on, and off waste, leads to certain imbalances, biases and gaps. Most notably, the livingness and agency of material rejects is often overlooked in theories that oppose humans and other-than-human waste. By way of conclusion, I propose the notion of ‘living waste’ – a more literal and material take on Bauman’s well-known concept ‘wasted lives’ – as a new point of departure for a reconceptualization of waste that might escape the prevailing dualisms and account simultaneously for ‘full-belly’ and ‘empty-belly’ contexts, human (wasted) lives and other-than-human waste materials, and understandings of lived experiences of waste.     

“It’s not just talk”: ideas,discourse, and the prospects for transformational change in a homogenous nation-state

ABSTRACT

Despite decades of large-scale immigration, systemic and institutionalized racism and ethnonationalism remain very strong in South Korea. One reason is obvious: South Korea is the quintessential homogeneous nation-state. Many observers, in fact, believe that it is one of the few societies in the world that is naturally homogenous. For this and other reasons, the prospect that South Korea can or will transform from homogenous nation-state to multicultural society is generally given very short shrift. I argue, however, that small but extremely significant steps toward a multicultural society have already been made and that the key reason is due to the introduction of ‘multiculturalism’ as an idea and discourse in Korean society. While a focus on ideas/discourse is hardly new, this paper contends that it has been seriously underappreciated, particularly in analyses of South Korea, as a cause of institutional stability on the one hand, and of institutional change and transformation, on the other hand.     

The Indian Ocean travels of Sheikh Yusuf and Imam Ali Ali: literary representations in Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit

This article investigates the narrative function of prominent Muslim travellers (both historical and fictional) across the Indian Ocean to South Africa in the seventeenth and nineteenth century respectively. Ishtiyaq Shukri, author of The Silent Minaret, juxtaposes the figure of Sheikh Yusuf with the protagonist Issa Shamsuddin of the narrative present to critique contemporary politics, both in post-apartheid South Africa and in the global North and its ‘war on terror’. Similarly, Achmat Dangor’s novel Bitter Fruit sheds light on the difficult choices faced by the main protagonist, Michael Ali, by drawing on the migration narrative of the Sufi Imam Ali Ali from India to South Africa in the 1890s. Both authors highlight the continuous history of imperial pursuits in the Indian Ocean world and their devastating effects in the past and the narrative present.     

“Brown girls can’t be gay”: Racism experienced by queer South Asian women in the Toronto LGBTQ community

Abstract

The absence of scholarship on South Asian discrimination in Western queer discourse contributes to a narrative that South Asians are not subjected to racially charged forms of discrimination in the LGBTQ community, which is fundamentally untrue. This article presents narrative-based accounts of nine queer South Asian women in Toronto, Canada, to examine the ways in which they experience racial discrimination in the LGBTQ community, and the impact that this mistreatment has on identity formation and connectivity to queer spheres. It finds that queer South Asian women experience racial discrimination in the form of racially charged microaggressions, which are evidenced through expectations of assimilation to Western-normative performances of queer identity and erasure of South Asian culture in the LGBTQ community. Further, it reveals that Toronto’s LGBTQ community perpetuates a culture of White privilege that discredits the intersectional identity of queer South Asian women, and consequently invisibilizes, alienates, and revokes agency from these women who do not fit the majority’s conceptualizations about what a queer woman looks like.     

Democracy as a transitional compass: women’s participation in South Africa and Kerala,India

ABSTRACT

In this article I explore the attempts by the states in South Africa and Kerala to create spaces for public participation by specifically focusing on women’s involvement in local spaces. Democracy is a crucial part of any emancipatory future that seeks to challenge and overcome inequality. I show that both states have ‘invited’ participation by women in various ways, but that the transformative potential of this participation is limited by national political economy, bureaucratization, and the lack of political will. In South Africa, the invited spaces eventually transformed into avenues for delivery and in response the women in this study shifted to inventing ways to engage in development in their personal lives. By using a double comparison – South Africa over time and South Africa compared to India – I argue that transformative politics requires a combination of invented and invited spaces.     

Neo-development of underdevelopment: Brazil and the political economy of South American integration under the Workers’ Party

ABSTRACT

This article critically assesses Brazil’s role in the South American regional integration process. My hypothesis is that despite the rhetoric of Brazil’s Workers’ Party (PT) governments about a ‘new developmentalism’ project to support ‘post-neoliberal’ regional integration, the structural continuities imposed by neoliberal macroeconomic policies have constrained all possibilities of overcoming underdevelopment. In the realm of regional integration, the driving force has been the internationalization of oligopolic Brazilian business in a process that promised Brazil a leadership role in the subcontinent. This frame has fostered business based on the overexploitation of labour and the destruction of the environment, enforcing trends that deepen the structures of economic dependency and social conflict. The political outcome of that process is that the PT has contributed to contain social pressures, both in the domestic and in regional contexts, as Brazil has played a moderating role in South America’s so-called progressive wave.     

Editorial

Abstract

This article considers the way in which documentary writing was used to represent both Cuba and the US South as sites of economic underdevelopment. Focusing on Carleton Beals and Walker Evans’ collaboration of text and photography, The Crime of Cuba (1933), I reorient conventional understandings of 1930s documentary from its focus on the US South and argue that the origins of the form can be traced to a much broader interest in representing poverty throughout the Americas. As areas of the South sunk into uncharted depths of hardship, the nations of Latin America became a frequent point of comparison and served as a way to measure poverty in the US. The role of Latin America as economic and cultural counterpoint to ‘modernization’ took on new significance during the Depression, and the inhabitants of the US South were simultaneously incorporated into this construction of underdevelopment. The narrative of progress was applied to both of these regions as a way of explaining the unequal distribution of wealth in the hemisphere.     

Introduction to the Special Collection

In this essay, the authors argue that although “South” and “North” are more and more becoming problematic categories in the social sciences, in general, and in migration studies, in particular, it still makes sense today to focus on South‐South migrations. Not only because of its mere quantitative importance, but for a number of reasons. Firstly, new South‐South migration patterns are observable and new data are becoming available. Secondly, South‐South migrations still have a number of distinct features, including: the role of borders, the composition of migration flows, the migration‐conflict nexus, regional migration governance, and the specific relationships with certain migration‐related concepts and variables.     

South Africa’s settler-colonial present: Khoisan revivalism and the question of indigeneity

ABSTRACT

South Africa’s settler-colonial past is widely acknowledged. And yet, commonplace understandings of the post-apartheid era and a focus on the end of segregation make an appraisal of settler colonialism in present-day South Africa difficult and controversial. Nonetheless, we argue that an understanding of South Africa’s “settler-colonial present” is urgent and needed. We suggest that settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination survives apartheid. In particular, we focus on the recent revival and political mobilisation of indigenous Khoisan identity and cultural heritage to show that settler colonialism and apartheid should be understood as distinct yet overlapping modes of domination. A settler-colonial mode of governance aiming at “the elimination of the native” in two interrelated domains, dispossession and transfer, characterises past and present South Africa. An understanding of this continuity offers opportunities for an original interpretation of both Khoisan revivalism and contemporary South African society.     

Young people's reproductions of the ‘father as provider’ discourse: intersections of race,class, culture and gender within a liberal democracy

ABSTRACT

Despite a plurality of paternal forms available to men, certain enactments of fathering remain immobile. In South Africa the ‘father as provider’ discourse, which establishes the legitimate father as one who provides financially for his family, continues to be regarded as the primary mark of a good father. Using photo-elicitation interviews to interrogate the persistence of this discourse, this paper examines how adolescents from two low-resourced South African communities construct fathering. Using a critical intersectional discursive framework, the analysis focuses on how gender, race, class and culture are implicated in the reproduction of the ‘father as provider’ discourse. Participants’ constructions suggest that the father’s duty to provide is intensified within marginalised contexts. Central to participants’ reproductions of the ‘father as provider’ discourse was a neoliberal conception of ‘freedom of choice’. The paper concludes that South Africa’s post-apartheid reliance on discourses around liberal democracy has cast the low-income father’s ability to fulfil the provider role as a conscious choice. While the father is made responsible for his failure to provide, broader structural oppressions are in turn rendered largely invisible by such discourse.     

‘Racism’, intersectionality and migration studies: framing some theoretical reflections

The concept of ‘racism’ has faced many difficulties in migration studies. Depending on definitions, islamophobia is a form either of religious discrimination or of racism. The same is true in contemporary debates in Europe about xenophobia against immigrants from the Global South. This article provides an alternative way of thinking about racism and its relationship with questions of intersectionality and discusses the relationship of these issues to migration theory. In the first part, we discuss intersectionality in relation to Fanon’s definition of racism. Then, we establish a dialogue between the work of de Sousa Santos and Fanon that could enrich our understanding of intersectionality in the framework of modernity and the capitalist/imperial/patriarchal/racial colonial world-system. Finally, we analyse this discussion’s implications for migration theory, highlighting how migration studies tend to reproduce a northern-centric social science view of the world that comes from the experience of others in the zone of being.     

Local realities and global possibilities: deconstructing the imaginations of aspiring migrants in Senegal

Recent studies show that the numbers of aspiring migrants continue to be on the increase worldwide not only in the typical emigration countries in the South but also in the usual destination countries in the North. Yet, while migration theorists have recently included the micro perspective of individual agency and sociocultural logics in their search for the engine behind the migration flows, far less research has been done on the sociocultural embeddedness of the imaginations of aspiring migrants, most of whom will never migrate. In Senegal, an increasing large number of men and women are very focused on transnational migration. This article tries to unravel the knot as to what lies at the core of this seeming national preoccupation with migration out of Senegal. Its conclusion suggests that the pervasive desire of so many is rooted in the way in which the economic claims of family members and friends are culturally informed.     

Jose Marti’s Confederate Affinities

ABSTRACT

Jose Marti examines the American Civil War and the period of Reconstruction through the lens of Cuba’s failed attempts at independence as a way of disenchanting modernizers and annexationists who, seeking rapprochement with the U.S., would compromise South American and, more specifically, Cuban sovereignty. More to the point, as much as Marti draws parallels between Cuba and the U.S. South vis-à-vis Spain and the U.S. North, respectively, his troubling affinity with the Confederacy and the postbellum South chiefly exposes the North’s ideological elision of its imperial project.     

Diffusion of Variegated Neoliberalization processes in Euro-Mediterranean policies: a strategic relational approach

ABSTRACT

Recent contributions to the study of neoliberalism have made considerable advances in transcending the dichotomy between understandings of the concept either as an ‘ideology’ or as a monolithic ‘structure’. In particular, the Variegated Neoliberalization (VNLT) approach has proposed an understanding of neoliberalism that relies on a path-dependent moment (i.e. the ‘uneven development of neoliberalization’) which is then followed by a path-shaping moment (i.e. the ‘neoliberalization of regulatory uneven development’). Such a perspective allows us to understand both systemic and contingent tendencies in neoliberalization processes across different geographies, transcending the socially constructed North–South divide. However, the VNLT approach has encountered a number of critiques, particularly in relation to its treatment of agency. In order to transcend these critiques and propose a more nuanced understanding of ways agents reflexively and recursively interpret and deepen – or refrain from deepening – neoliberal norms, I turn to the Strategic-Relational Approach (SRA) proposed by [Jessop, B. (2001). Institutional re(turns) and the strategic – relational approach. Environment and Planning A, 33(7), 1213–1235]. Through the SRA, it becomes possible to pinpoint both instances of ‘structured coherence’ and ‘patterned incoherence’ resulting from agential reflexivity in different contexts of neoliberalization. I will therefore turn to cases where these two patterns can be observed in the context of Euro-Mediterranean policies – that is, Morocco’s ‘structured coherence’ due to its internalized and deepening neoliberalization, and Egypt’s ‘patterned incoherence’ as a result of its still uneven development of neoliberalization.     

Singlish or Globish: Multiple language ideologies and global identities among Korean educational migrants in Singapore1

South Korean early study abroad students and their parents in Singapore negotiate and redefine the values of Mandarin, English, and Singlish used in Singapore in an attempt to forge their own transnational identities. In this process, these Korean migrants tend to place more emphasis on metapragmatic discourses; that is, how to speak the languages appropriately. They then use such metapragmatic evaluations to justify their use of the local varieties and practices of language in Singapore. Their discourses are based on two language ideologies –pragmatism and sociolinguistic competence – which are examined here as alternative forms of language legitimacy that coexist with the dominant notion of legitimate language. These multiple language ideologies provide the basis for Korean migrants’ emerging notions of the ‘Asian global,’ a desirable transnational subject who is more practical and sociocentric than the conventional image of high‐ranking elites, with greater adaptability to various local situations. ????? ?? ????? ???? ??? ????, ???? ??? ???? ???? ????, ??, ???, ????? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ???. ??? ??? ?? ????, ??? ???? ????? ??? ?????? ??, ? ?? ??? ??? ? ??? ???, ??? ??? ????? ???? ?????? ?? ?? ????, ??? ??? ??? ???? ??? ???? ??? ????? ? ????? ????? ?? ??? ??. ??? ??? ????? ??? ????? ????? ??? ???? ? ?? ???????? ?? ????, ??? ??? ???????? ?? ???? ???????? ???? ??. ??, ??????? ??? ?? ?? ???????? ??? ??? ???? ‘???? ???’? ??, ? ??? ??????? ?? ???? ?? ???? ????? ??, ?? ??????? ???????, ??? ??? ???? ???? ? ??? ? ?? ???? ???? ??? ??? ????. [Korean]     

Migrant women,place and identity in contemporary women’s writing

While recent scholarship on migration has reflected growing attention to gender and to the intersectionality of race, gender and sexuality, there has been little focus on women’s emotional and bodily responses to migration in the context of larger structures of sexism, racism and the legacies of colonialism. In this paper, I examine some literary portrayals of how migrant women’s relationships with specific places of origin and settlement, both steeped in structural relationships of unequal power and experienced on an immediate, psychological and bodily plane, are fundamental to migrant women’s changing sense of belonging and identity. Jamaica Kincaid in her novel Lucy, Tsitsi Dangarembga in her novel Nervous Conditions and Dionne Brand in the opening poems of her volume No Language is Neutral evoke some of the complex ways in which migration can affect women’s lives and identities, thus both complementing and critiquing some contemporary theorisations of migration and migrant identities.     

Versatile kinship: trans-African family formations and postcolonial disillusionment in Niq Mhlongo’s After Tears

Much of the existing scholarship on Niq Mhlongo’s works has engaged with the author’s portrayal of township life and his use of humour and deceit to address pressing contemporary socio-economic issues. This article examines the constructions and contestations of belonging in his novel After Tears with particular focus on the trope of the family and its reconstruction through multiple engagements with migrants from other parts of Africa. Reading the novel against the background of the study of family fictions in the South African transition, I argue that Mhlongo’s employment of the trope is indicative of the novel’s disillusionment with the democratic promise. For spectacular forms of deception and trickery, rather than affective bonds of care and love, hold the family together and become essential characteristics of postapartheid subject formation and versatile forms of kinship. After Tears, I suggest, assesses the possibilities and failures of trans-African family formations, but also (and notwithstanding the author’s appeal for continental solidarity) writes into being more conservative, citizenship-bound notions of family that are tightly interwoven with the characters’ experience of postcolonial disillusionment.