Modern Korea & The Korean Diaspora

Catalog description

Rather than a comprehensive history of the Korean diaspora, our study will focus on specific histories of displacement and movement out of Korea at different historical junctures, and of settling, or dwelling in Japan and the United States. Chronologically, our readings and discussion will be grouped into three periods. From 1900-1945, a period of competing colonialisms and empires in Asia/Pacific, we will look at how Koreans became racialized in Japan and the United States through institutions and structures like the labor market, with specific focus on Korean day laborers in 1920s Japan and Korean agricultural workers in Hawaii and the West Coast, and how they adopted and/or resisted identities as subjects of the Japanese empire, or as an ethnic-minority in the United States. From 1945-1990, a period of national partition, followed by the Korean War that, unending, made the Cold War especially ferocious on the Korean peninsula, we will examine specific political organizations and movements in Korea, Japan, and the United States that sought various ways of challenging U.S. hegemony in East Asia, overcoming the structure of division (both political and psychological), while at the same time challenging long-standing, structured inequalities of class and race in Japan and the United States. From 1990-present, a period of democratic transition in Korea, we will also examine the increased possibility of moving between cities like Los Angeles and Seoul not as separate spaces, but almost as a single community, in tandem with money, goods, and information. Examining various narratives (including literature and film) about experiences of displacement, and of living within or on the margins of dominant cultures in 20th century Japan and United States, we will pay attention to how identities (such as Zainichi, or Korean-American) were constituted by and against complex…