Korean American Diaspora

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Korean American Diaspora

• Dr. Young Rae Oum
• Hanyang International Summer School
• Session 3
• Theorizing Asian American Identities

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Session 3 Theorizing Asian American Identities

• Theorizing Asian American Difference
• By.
• Ethnicity
• Immigrant generation (1, 1.5, 2, 3rd gen.)
• Time of immigration and duration
• Gender
• Class
• Politics
• Religion
• Language
• Urban vs. rural
• Refugees vs. non-refugees
• Region (West coast vs East coast etc)

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Session 3 Theorizing Asian American Identities
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Session 3 Theorizing Asian American Identities

• Acculturation model
• Portrays immigration and relocation as a loss of
  the original culture in exchange for the new
  American culture.
• Asian American narratives adopt such framework.
  E.g. conflict between the Asian-born first gen.
  parents and American born second gen children.
• (Joy luck club, The women warrior, Still life
  with rice)
• Critique
• Such a master narrative essentializes Asian
  Americans (as exclusively hierarchical and
  familial).
• Reduction of social difference into privatized
  familial opposition.
• Commodification of Asian American cultural
  difference.
• Denying the histories of mateiral exclusion and
  differentiation.

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Session 3 Theorizing Asian American Identities

• Essentializing languages in describing an Asian
  identity
• More (or less) Chinese/Korean/Japanese/Filippino(a
  )
• Authenticity
• Chinese/Korean/Japanese enough
• Both Asian/Korean/Chinese/Japanese cultures and
  Asian American cultures are fluid and changing
  never fixed or pure.
• Asians as a racial group was produced in the
  negotiation between the states regulation of
  racial groups and those groups active
  contestation and construction of racial meanings.
  
• Asian American cultural practices are partly
  inherited, partly modified, as well as partly
  invented.
• They are also partly a response to the dominant
  representations that deny/subordinate Asian
  American cultures as an exotic and inferior
  other.

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Session 3 Theorizing Asian American Identities

• Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity as
  concepts to theorize Asian Americans
• Heterogeneity Differences and differential
  relationships within a bounded category, Asian
  Americansdifferences of national origin,
  generation, and class backgrounds.
• Hybridity Reflects the history of survival
  within relationships of unequal power and
  domination. (Not simply assimilation of Asian
  practices to dominant forms.)
• Multiplicity Indicates the ways in which
  subjects located within social relations are
  determined by several different axes of power by
  the contradictions of capitalism, patriarchy, and
  race relations.
• These concepts enable us to counter the
  construction of Asian Americans as homogenous,
  fixed, and stable, to destablize such notion
  which has been used for managing Asian population
  through exclusion acts.

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Session 3 Theorizing Asian American Identities

• Why, then, is it necessary to organize, resist,
  and theorize as Asian Americans (while avoiding
  the risks of cultural politics that relies on the
  construction of sameness and exclusion of
  difference)?
• Neither the dominant nor the emergent cultures
  are discrete, fixed, or homogeneous.
• E.g. California-multicultural state? A pluralist
  attempt at containment of those differences?
• Immigrant minority cultures are perpetually
  changing in composition, configuration, and
  signifying practices.
• Hegemony needs to be looked at not only in terms
  of economic and political forms of ruling, but
  also as a process of dissent and compromise.
• Hegemony is the social processes through which a
  particular dominance is maintained as well as the
  processes through which the dominance is
  challenged and new forces are articulated.
  (Antonio Gramsci)

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Session 3 Theorizing Asian American Identities

• In other words, there is no such thing as
  absolute hegemony. There are always counter
  processes of resistances from emerging groups.
  When particular group constitutes itself as the
  majority and define minorities as other,
  various and incommensurable positions of
  otherness may ally and constitute a new majority.
  
• Subaltern prehegemonic, not unified groups,
  whose histories are fragmented, episodic, and
  identifiable only from a point of historical
  hindsight.
• Racialized immigrant groups in the US, aliens
  ineligible to citizenship.
• Not unified means these groups are not fixed,
  unified force of a single character but a
  coordination of distinct (yet allied) positions,
  practices, and movements. (e.g. class based,
  gender-based, etc.)

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Session 3 Theorizing Asian American Identities

• Asian American identity as an organizing tool
  provided a concept of political unity that
  enables diverse Asian groups to understand
  unequal circumstances and histories as being
  related.
• It also articulates and empowers the diverse
  Asian American community vis-à-vis the
  institutions and apparatuses that exclude and
  marginalize it.
• Risks
• Underestimating the differences and inadvertantly
  supporting the racist discourses that constructs
  Asians as a homogenous group.
• Masculine voices dominating the group and making
  Asian American women invisible.
• A particular ethnicity (Chinese/Japanese)
  becoming examplary of all Asians.
• A false opposition between feminism and
  nationalism.

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Session 3 Theorizing Asian American Identities

• Disscourses that oppose nativism and assimilation
  is common in Asian American debates and
  literature.
• E,g. Controversy over Maxin Hong Kingstons The
  woman warriorexaggeration of Chinese patriarchy,
  undermining the Asian American men.
• Frantz Fanon A new social order that overcomes
  the colonial orderthe new postcolonial social
  order must not duplicate the domination of
  colonizers.
• Generational conflict framework often found in
  Asian American novels. Privitizing social
  conflicts.

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Session 3 Theorizing Asian American Identities

• Many Korean American novels also follow such
  storyline

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Session 3 Theorizing Asian American Identities

• Class exercise
• Discussion questions
• Is Asian American a valid/useful category?
• What justifies the term Asian American?
• What is strategic essentialism?
• Analysis of autobiographical narratives using the
  concepts of
• Heterogeneity
• Hybridity
• Multiplicity

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For Friday

• Read Mary Paik Lee and think about
• Her identity (how she narrates herself)
• Early immigrant experiences