Emergent Cultural Identities of Jaehan Miguk Hanin: From Marginalization to Global Nationalism

Park Christian Joon

doi:10.18107/japs.2018.25.2.003

To make sense of globalizing South Korea and the return migration of Korean Americans as they navigate in the transnational hierarchies of race, ethnicity, and nation, this paper introduces a new word ‘miguk hanin’ as a replacement for ‘jaemi gyopo’ which refers to an imagined group of ethnic Koreans residing in the US. Therefore, Korean Americans who havemigrated to South Korea and residing in South Korea would be called ‘jaehan miguk hanin.’ The focus of this paper is to examine the different types of Korean American return migration and the emergent cultural identities negotiated and redefined by Korean Americans as they are perceived in dichotomized images of global Korean heroes and ‘failed’ immigrants. Korean Americans are not a homogeneous group, but consists of various people with different ethnic identities or senses of belonging that are constantly shifting. Accordingly, Korean Americans residing in South Korea are constructing emergent cultural identities of their own. Considering the ethnic status and history of Korean American diasporic community which has been oscillating between a Korea-centered to a Korean American focus, jaehan miguk hanin faced with differentiation do not redefine their identity in simple nationalist terms as Americans vis-à-vis the Koreans. Rather, the process of identity negotiation can be understood in two as a strengthening of a transnational identity of ‘Korean Americans’ as a response to the marginalization in South Korea and the formation of a new ethnic identity of global Koreans.

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* 2021년 이후 발행 논문의 참고문헌은 현재 구축 중입니다.

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