Diasporic youth culture of K-pop

This study examines how diasporic Korean youth engage with the recent global circulation of South Korean pop music (‘K-pop’). It explores how young diasporic Koreans negotiate K-pop as an ethnic and/or global cultural form in their transition to adulthood. Drawing on interviews with young people of Korean heritage in Canada, the study addresses how a diasporic sound, which connects the nostalgia for the ancestral homeland and the global mediascape, is appropriated for young people’s identity work. By examining diasporic Korean fans’ consumption of K-pop, this study suggests a perspective for understanding the recent K-pop phenomenon as a diasporic youth cultural practice.     

The struggle over class,identity, and language: A case study of South Korean transnational families1

Globalization, while deterritorializing identity and culture, generates new practices and subjectivities that must be understood with reference to relationships between identity, language, and class in multiple markets. Through interviews and ethnographic observations focusing on children's language learning practices, this article examines how transnational South Korean families locate themselves in relation to the phenomenon of jogi yuhak, ‘early study abroad.’ It focuses on two graduate student families’ struggle over securing their social position by portraying themselves as different from other transnational Korean families through investing in alternate forms of linguistic capital. This reflects their contradictory and shifting subjectivities as they negotiate between foregrounding their roles as moral and intellectual elites vs. acting as materialistic parents. These transnational families’ struggles and conflicts underline how globalization in general, and jogi yuhak as a transnational strategy in particular, affects individuals’ subjectivities at the intersection of class, language, and transnationalism. ???? ????? ??? ???? ??? ?????? ???, ??? ?? ????? ??? ???, ??, ??? ?????? ??? ?? ?? ???? ?? ??? ??? ??? ????? ??. ??? ??? ?? ??? ??? ?? ? ??? ????? ?? ??? ?? ??? ???? ?? ?? ???? ? ???? ??? ???? ??? ??? ?????? ??? ??? ????? ??? ??? ????. ??? ???? ?? ? ??? ??? ???? ??? ??? ??? ???? ??? ??? ???? ???? ??? ??? ?? ????? ?????? ??????? ??? ????? ????. ??, ???? ?? ????? ???, ?? ?????? ??? ?? ??? ????? ?? ???? ?? ??? ?? ????? ?????? ???? ????? ????? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ????. ?? ???? ???? ??? ??? ????? ????, ??? ???? ?????? ????? ????, ?? ??? ?????? ?????? ??? ??? ??? ??? ????? ????. [Korean]     

Home and away: modern Korean identities and minorities

ABSTRACT

South Korea is an evolving country that encourages immigration, and which presents itself as a multicultural country. Nevertheless, multiculturalism has not gone as smoothly as the government would like us to believe, and discrimination and racism are serious issues, especially due to Korea’s self-imposed ideology of Korean purity and homogeneity. This complicates Koreans’ sense of identity, both at home and abroad, issues dealt with in this special issue, which features three articles that deal with the complexities of ethnicity and identity in the twenty-first century. These articles look at the transformative notions surrounding Korean identity in Korea, and how the lingering legacy of colonial history negatively frames this identity in Japan. Finally, there is an examination of Korean immigrant entrepreneurship in Argentina, looking at the Korean community there in a very different socio-historical reality, where people negotiate their identities beyond the structures of Japan’s colonial legacy.     

Linguistic competency and citizenship: Contrasting portraits of multilingualism in the South Korean popular media1

This paper examines how metapragmatic framings of multilingual competency and incompetency have become indexes of global and South Korean citizenship in the South Korean popular media. Drawing upon depictions of multilingualism in South Korean television deurama (‘drama’), comedy skits, and popular music, it examines how the locus of modernity and cosmopolitanism is moving away from the U.S.‐oriented overseas Korean (gyopo) and towards the figure of the elite transnational returnee (saldaon saram). It argues that as the transnational circulation of people, media, and ideologies accelerates in the age of globalization, intra‐ethnic discourses of linguistic mockery will also intensify. 本文檢視南韓大眾媒體中的多語現象, 探討擁有多語能力如何成為判定是世界公民和南韓公民的依據。我們探索在全球化下, 欠缺語言能力的種族化形象的跨國流傳, 以及同民族間的語言嘲諷現象的興起。這篇文章觀察南韓電視連續劇、綜藝節目喜劇單元和流行音樂中對多語現象的呈現, 據此分析多語現代性和世界主義如何從過去曾是南韓旅美僑胞的表徵, 轉變成當今海歸(跨國鍍金後返國)人士的專屬形象。[Mandarin] ? ??? ??? ????? ??? ??? ?? ??? ???? ??????? ????? ??? ???? ???? ?? ??? ??? ???? ???? ?? ????. ???, ??? ?, ??? ?? ?? ? ????? ?? ?????? ??? ??? ??? ???? ?? ???? ???? ??? ?????? ?? ?? ??? ?? ????? ???? ??? ????. ??, ???? ?? ??? ???, ?????? ???? ??? ??? ???? ? ???, ???? ??? ???? ??? ??? ????. [Korean]     

Silver Inflation and the Senate in 1933

Along with the ever-increasing racial/ethnic diversity in U.S. schools, researchers began to investigate the impact of racial/ethnic identity on young people's understanding of the nation's history. Compared to other racial minorities, Asian American students have received little academic and educational attention. This article seeks to address this gap through a qualitative study on Korean American youth. Drawing from in-depth interviews with twenty Korean American high school students, this article examines how Korean American youth make sense of U.S. history and how their sociocultural backgrounds affect their historical perspectives as well as their ideas and experiences of learning history historical perspectives.     

Constructing Transnational Identities without Leaving Home: Korean Immigrant Women's Cognitive Border-crossing

Literature on contemporary immigrants suggests that increasing volume of transnational practices foster identity construction across borders, thereby disjoining geographical space and social space in which identities are constructed and negotiated. While studies pay increasing attention to the linkage between transnational organizing of economic and political activities and that of identities, relatively less attention has been given to transnational identity construction of immigrant groups without high level of transnationalism. This essay documents the identity dynamics among less mobile immigrants, who, albeit their immobility, negotiate their identities transnationally by way of various identity practices to imagine themselves as members of multiple communities across national and cultural boundaries. Based on thirty in-depth interviews with first generation Korean immigrant women, the author examines mechanisms of identity organizing which simultaneously indicate a gradual adaptation to the U.S. society and resistance to assimilation.     

Negotiating cultural boundaries: Confucianism and trans/national identity in Korea 1

Abstract

This essay looks to the complex intercultural relations of China and Korea to highlight two important issues in political theory and international relations: the transnational nature of world politics and the limits of analytical binaries such as East‐West and tradition‐modernity. Discussions of international politics in East Asia characteristically address issues of security and development studies. More recently, Confucianism has been mobilized as part of the clash of civilizations of Asia with the West. This essay will consider how cultural boundaries are negotiated within the region via an analysis of the workings of the transnational discourse of Confucianism in the construction of Korean identity. While many make truth claims about what ‘Confucianism’ means in Korea, this essay examines the discursive economies of ‘Confucian events’ in three overlapping social spaces: official, mass media, and academic. This essay will show the diversity of Confucianism within East Asia, and underline how rather than being a simple orthodoxy, the shape of Confucianism is an active political issue. While many try to define a core ‘Korean Confucianism’, I argue that we should use Confucianism as an analytical tool to understand something else, citing how some scholars are using Confucianism for the specific project of building democracy in Korea.     

The dialectics of politics and aesthetics in the Chinese Korean dance drama,the spirit of Changbai Mountain

This article explores the relationships between the political aspirations and aesthetic endeavours expressed in the Chinese Korean dance drama, The Spirit of Changbai Mountain, and how they relate to the political, cultural and ethnic identity of this migrant community. The nationality policies and socialist ideology of cultural production in China give shape to this dance drama, which depicts a collective history of the Korean minority as full members of the Chinese multi-ethnic socialist state. While political conformity is explicitly stated in the accompanying Chinese prose, more subtle, poetic expressions of different emotions are articulated through the non-verbal medium of dance and music whose meanings are drawn from the shared experiences specific to this ethnic community. Additionally, the aesthetic differentiation made by the Chinese Korean artists between their dance and those of their homelands illustrates how Korean tradition is identified and interpreted in this diaspora to define their cultural hybridity. It is suggested that the performance of The Spirit of Changbai Mountain is simultaneously a political and aesthetic event in which a variety of aspirations and identities are expressed in dialectics. These dynamics can also be understood in terms of a discursive field of power which underpins the production and consumption of minority/diaspora performance in general.     

Identity processes in the global era: the case of young immigrants living in Italy

The paper explores processes of identity construction in young people of foreign origin living in Italy. The aim was to understand how youth construct their selves in the global era, characterized by an increase in the possibility of choosing but also in the perception of uncertainty; how they perceive this uncertainty, whether as a chance to construct multifaceted and continually changing identities or as a source of insecurity and loss for their identity. Drawing on 46 in-depth interviews, the research reveals that young people of foreign origin are continually shaping their identities mixing different cultural repertories related to their – or their parents’ – homeland, to the host country, global cultures and youth cultures. Several patterns of identity emerge and they are linked to different perception of uncertainty. A typology of these patterns was developed: young people construct flexible identities or hyphenated identities, or move from a fixed identity to an undefined identity. These types of identity are respectively associated with the perception of uncertainty as a resource, as a constraint, finally with a strategy of reducing or eliminating uncertainty.     

From FOB to cool: Transnational migrant students in Toronto and the styling of global linguistic capital

Globalization and the rise of ‘Korean cool’ provide middle‐class Korean yuhaksaeng (visa students) in Toronto with resources they can mobilize as strategies of distinction. In their construction of themselves as new transnational subjects with hybrid identities that are simultaneously global and Korean, yuhaksaeng deploy re‐valued varieties of Korean language and culture as stylistic resources in the globalized new economy. In this process, yuhaksaeng contest their marginal positions as ‘FOBs’ (Fresh‐Off‐the‐Boats) and ‘Nerds’ in dominant Western racial discourse, and construct themselves as wealthy, modern, and cosmopolitan ‘Cools’vis‐à‐vis long‐term immigrants in local Korean diasporic communities as well as Canadians. The stories of yuhaksaeng illustrate how notions of ‘global’ and ‘local’ linguistic resources are transformed under the material conditions of globalization and its structures of inequality. ???? ‘??? ?’? ??? ???? ???? ??? ?? ????? ???? ?? ???? ?? ??? ????. ????? ???? ?? ??? ?????? ??? ????? ?? ??? ???, ???? ??????? ??? ???? ??? ???? ?? ??? ???? ??? ?????? ?? ???? ????. ? ???? ????? ??? ??? ?? ?????? ‘FOBs’ (Fresh‐Off‐the‐Boats) ? ‘Nerds’ ? ?? ??? ???? ????, ???? ???? ???? ?????? ??? ??? ??????? ????, ???? ???? ???????? ‘?’? ???? ????. ? ?? ??? ????? ???? ???? ??? ??? ? ???? ?? ??? ????? ???? ???? ??? ?????? ??? ????. [Korean]     

Ethnicity,opportunity, and upward mobility: Korean entrepreneurship in the Argentine garment industry 1965–2015

ABSTRACT

Currently, among the approximately 20,000 ethnic Koreans living in Argentina, an estimated 80% are engaged in the garment industry. Within the theoretical frameworks of immigrant entrepreneurship, this research examines why and how Korean Argentines have been continuously concentrated in the clothing industry from the beginning of Korean immigration in the 1960s to the present. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Argentina and on archival and documentary research, this study illustrates how Korean immigrant community in Argentina has settled and achieved upward mobility in the face of complex and fluctuating social and economic circumstances, combining opportunities with strategies and resources to create comparative advantages and benefits. By combining historical contextualisation with theories on immigrant entrepreneurs that had previously only been tested on short-term study periods, findings further suggest that scholars should pay closer attention to historical shifts and accounts in analysing longer-term periods of ethnic business.     

Class,place and mobility beyond the global city: stigmatisation and the cosmopolitanisation of the local

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on a multi-sited qualitative study of youth in regional Australia to explore the contemporary relationship between class, place attachment, and the imperative towards mobility and cosmopolitanism. The paper shows how local classed identities shape how young people situate themselves and their localities in relation to the rest of the world, and how experiences of mobility produce classed attachments to place. Here, place is made meaningful within the broader cultural politics of inequality in neoliberalism, in which the moral denigration of figures of the working class come to stand for the disadvantage currently associated with regional places. However local classed histories offer some young people the capacity for resistance, whilst others are unable to reframe their localities in positive terms. Moreover, whilst cosmopolitanism is a mode of classed distinction across the two research sites, this can be enacted either through practices of mobility, or through the repositioning of the local in cosmopolitan terms through the identity practices of middle-class youth. The paper therefore reveals new ways in which local social and economic histories offer young people different ways in which to relate to notions of mobility as well as to reconstruct the meaning of their home.     

A reconceptualization of state transnationalism: South Korea as an illustrative case

Our reconceptualization of state transnationalism underlines the active role that states can play in generating and sustaining cross‐border flows between a nation's homeland and its diasporic communities. This represents a sort of ‘middle ground’ between formerly hegemonic state centric’ approaches to global processes (focusing heavily on the ‘international’) and more recent ones emphasizing ‘transnational’ dynamics (which primarily arise through the agency of cross‐border migrants). We discuss a typology of approaches and avoid the tendency to set nation‐states against global and transnational processes. In fact, we highlight the various ways in which states often initiate key transnational flows, such as migration and the integration of diasporic communities into the sending nation, as well as maintain and regulate various processes instigated by immigrants. As an iconic case, we present an illustrative study of the South Korean government and Korean diasporic communities in the USA. Finally, in a brief conclusion, we outline some challenges for future research.     

In the path of heroes: second-generation Tamil-Canadians after the LTTE

This paper explores how second-generation Tamil-Canadian university students have modified their ‘cultural heritage’ in the period after the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009. Using a generational framework suggested by the work of Karl Mannheim, I show that the events of May 2009 situated second-generation Tamil-Canadian political activism as a response to the ambivalence of their parents to the conflict in Sri Lanka. Second-generation Tamil-Canadians are also shown to have altered the key LTTE symbol of the Maaveerar (great hero) to better fit a transnational social field that is framed by the new realities of post-LTTE Sri Lanka and by intolerance to imported conflict in Canada. I argue that the Tamil second generation is highly engaged with the politics of their cultural identity, and that this engagement may have a lasting influence on transnational Tamil identity and on the political status of the Tamil community within Canada.     

Coping with Conflict,Confronting Resistance: Fieldwork Emotions and Identity Management in a South Korean Evangelical Community

Methodological difficulties attendant to ethnographic fieldwork—such as gaining access, maintaining fieldwork relations, objectivity, and fieldwork stresses—are intensified for researchers working with “absolutist” religious group, groups that hold an exclusivist or totalistic definition of truth. Based on my fieldwork in a conservative South Korean evangelical community, I explore in this article two central and related methodological dilemmas pertaining to studying absolutist religious groups: identity negotiation and emotional management during fieldwork. Writing from my complex location as a feminist and a cultural/religious insider/outsider in relation to the South Korean evangelical community, I explore in particular the challenges posed by identity/role management in the field and its emotional dimensions, including the issue of the researcher’s power and vulnerability, the quandary of “conformity,” and the emotional costs of self-repression arising from the researcher’s fundamental value conflicts with the group. I conclude with a reflection on the implications of these experiences for ethnographic methodology, most centrally, how we manage our emotional responses in the field, including “inappropriate” ones, and how we can relate them to the research process.

Depoliticising literature,politicising diversity: ethno-racial boundaries in Dutch literary professionals’ aesthetic repertoires

Although still a neglected area, over the years a growing body of sociological research on the position of ethno-racial minorities in Western artistic fields has emerged. With this article we aim to contribute to this research area by focusing on ethno-racial diversity in the Dutch literary field. Through in-depth interviews, we analyse how gatekeepers mobilise specific cultural repertoires and by doing so draw ethno-racial boundaries when discussing acquisition, assessing quality and positioning themselves in the literary field. We argue that literary publishers and other professionals (selectively) employ an ‘old school’ modernist repertoire that especially values the formal aspects of literary products, by which non-white writers and publishers concerned with diversity are often positioned in an identity politics framework. Their work is said to take in a less prestigious ‘political’/’subjective’ position rather than a ‘literary’/‘universal’ one. As such, this paper informs on how gatekeepers’ practices shape the position of non-white authors in the Dutch literary field.     

Negotiating Ethnic Identity in the College Korean Language Classes

This article examines the ways in which second-generation Korean-American students form and transform their senses of ethnicity through their participation in Korean language classes at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. These classes were largely populated by second-generation Korean-Americans. Called the "New Second Generation," these Korean-American students, who have "successfully" proceeded through the American educational system, show that adaptation to the host society does not necessarily lead to assimilated American identity, and that learning Korean (a "heritage" language) does not necessarily lead to homogeneous ethnic identity formation. Although "heritage" (or "ethnic") language has often been taken up as a symbol for group maintenance, my study shows that actual interaction with the language is complexly and heterogeneously experienced among the group members, especially in relation to the ethnic identity formation process. Korean classes (as a transnational social field) contain complicated and contradictory characteristics, resulting from their complex mixture of class participants, their institutional location, and their national and transnational situation. Korean-American language learners negotiate their sense of ethnic identity by interacting with social meanings initiated from words, passages, illustrations, and texts. Furthermore, Korean-American student's language performance and cultural tastes, which are perceived and evaluated by themselves and others, differently locate these students on a continuum of "Koreanness" and "Americanness," reflecting different relationships to Korea and different senses of being Korean.     

‘A ondi queras’: Ranchero identity construction by U.S. born Mexicans on Facebook

This study describes how transnational second‐generation Mexican bilinguals use a stigmatized variety of Mexican Spanish to communicate on Facebook and construct an identity. The stereotyped features of this variety index a ranchero identity. Historically, ranchero is an ambivalent identity for Mexican society in general. On the one hand, ranchero culture is a positive reminiscence of Mexico's agrarian past, while on the other, rancheros, along with indigenous Mexicans, are at the bottom of the hierarchy in Mexican society. A discourse‐centered, ethnographic analysis of digitally mediated conversations demonstrates how language use allows participants to reminisce about their collective past, maintain Mexican identities tied to their ancestors, fit their identities to contemporary U.S. Mexican culture, and distance themselves from the stigma associated with the ranchero background.     

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]     

Reimagining the Homeland: Zainichi Koreans’ Transnational Longing for North Korea

This paper explores the changing relationship of diaspora to the homeland. In particular, this article focuses on the changing relationship of pro-North Korea, Zainichi Koreans (Koreans in Japan) towards North Korea. Many Koreans in Japan continue to identify with North Korea, but the nature of this relationship has changed, due to shifting generational attitudes towards both the host society and North Korea. A dance recital I witnessed in an ethnic Korean high school in Japan exemplifies these changes. I suggest that the symbols highlighted within the recital articulate a particular form of political-ethnic identity that is characterised by a long distance nationalism, but without the desire to return to the homeland. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork with members of the pro-North Korea organisation, Ch'ongry?n, this paper explores how diasporic groups construct, negotiate, and reproduce identity in relation to nation states and transnational processes.