[KS] Conference Report: Korean Diaspora: Beyond Colonialism and Cold War, Tubingen, 6-8 October 2011

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Subject: H-ASIA: CONF REPT Korean Diaspora: Beyond Colonialism and Cold War, Tubingen, 6-8 October 2011

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December 21, 2011

Conference Report "Korean Diaspora: Beyond Colonialism and Cold War"
University of Tubingen, 6-8 October 2011

(x-post H-Soz-u-Kult)
*********************************************************************
From: H-Net Review:

Korean Diaspora: Beyond Colonialism and Cold War. Tubingen: Korean
Studies Section, Department of Chinese and Korean Studies, University
of Tubingen; National Institute of Korean History, Republic of Korea,
06.10.2011-08.10.2011.

Reviewed by Robert Kramm-Masaoka
Published on H-Soz-u-Kult (December, 2011)


Korean Diaspora: Beyond Colonialism and Cold War

The conference Korean Diaspora: Beyond Colonialism and Cold War,
organized by the section of Korean Studies at the University of
Tubingen, was an international conferences on modern Korean history
in Germany. Although the conference focused particularly on the
practices, discourses, and experiences of the Korean diaspora, it
approached the border-crossing exchange and mobility of people as an
integral part of the history of the modern world. In Korea as
elsewhere, transnational flows of migration and diaspora constructions
reveal prevalent challenges of todays nation states. To inquire the
political, social, economic, and cultural demands by migrants and
people living in the diaspora, it enables us to raise questions of
integration, solidarity, and conflict during the process of the
formation of heterogeneous societies.

Experiences and practices of migration and diaspora highly pervade the
history of modern Korea. Furthermore, they are closely connected to
global orders of modernity, colonialism, the Cold War, and
globalization. The histories of Korean migration and diaspora thereby
highlight the influx of Korean workforce and goods throughout Asia,
Europe and the Americas, and furthermore illustrate the global
connections between the Koreas and the world. The conference assembled
historians, political scientists, sociologists, and Korean Studies
specialists, thus tackling the issue of Korean migration and diaspora
from a trans-disciplinary perspective, and was held bilingually in
English and Korean. Case studies of Korean Diasporas in Japan, China,
Northeast and Central Asia, Germany, the United States, and the Koreas
were combined with theoretical reflections on migration and diaspora
beyond the meta-narratives of colonialism and cold war.

The first panel Colonialism and Migration focused on the nexus between
Korean migration and the history of the Japanese empire in Japan,
Northeast Asia, and Hawaii. In the first paper, SOON WON PARK (Seoul)
addressed the transformation of the Koreans in Japan from their status
as colonial subjects to Alien Residents in Japan during the U.S.
occupation of Japan. This ambiguous legal status was, according to
Park, furthermore affected by the reversed course U.S. Cold War
politics, in which the Korean community with its close ties to the
Japanese Communist Party and other mostly socialist Japanese activists
during the wartime period was not perceived as victims of Japanese
colonialism, but rather further persecuted as a left-wing social
movement. BYUNG YOOL BAN (Seoul) was presenting problems arising from
Korean migration to Russian Far East since the end of the nineteenth
century. Through the long migration history of Koreans who had
successfully settled and become Soviet citizens, many Korean leaders
and elites had come to play significant roles in the Soviet Communist
Party, administrative agencies and the army. However, in the 1930s
Russia Far East was bordering with the Korean peninsula and Manchuria
as part of the expanding Japanese empire and complicated the everyday
lives of Korean migrants, whose histories have been almost unexplored.
In his paper, WAYNE PATTERSON (De Pere, WI) used the framework of
Japans imperialist security policy to integrate the issue of Korean
emigration to Hawaii as an additional reason for Japan's expansion. In
1903 Koreans were brought to Hawaii as strikebreakers against Japanese
plantation workers and forced them subsequently to migrate further
within U.S. territory, predominantly to California. The resulting
influx of Japanese migrants in California forced, according to
Patterson, the Japanese government to intervene in order to prevent a
Japanese Exclusion Act and a loss of Japan's national prestige. Japan
could also successfully establish diplomatic representatives in
Hawaii, which enabled Japan to appear as benevolent representative to
handle Koreas diplomatic affairs in Hawaii, and due to its benevolent
facade Japan was not objected to takeover Korea in 1910 by the United
States. MICHAEL KIM (Seoul) highlighted the ambiguities of Korean
citizenship in Manchuria, which were part of a broader transnational
history of migration to North East Asia. The issue of citizenship was
thereby closely entwined with the emergence of modern states such as
Manchukuo in 1932 to tackle the vast numbers of unregistered and
stateless individuals, who were moving uncontrolled across the borders
of the North East Asian states. Thus the census registration in
Manchukuo played a central role in the administration of many Korean
migrants and their citizenship in that region.

In the second panel, titled Cold War and Migration I, DEUNG-JOONG KIM
(Gwacheon, Republic of Korea) examined population migration within the
Korean peninsula during the Korean War. Kim points out that such
migration played a major role in forming the establishment of South
Korean and North Korean societies. While focusing on defectors from
the North, mostly anti-communists, Kim shows how they filled important
positions in administration, army, youth organization, church,
literature and arts fields and were highly influential on political
relations and the developing social frame which subsequently formed
and altered South Korea. VALERIY KHAN (Tashkent) portrayed the life,
identity and achievements of Korean migrants, so-called Koryo-saram or
Soviet Koreans, during the Soviet and post-soviet period in Central
Asia. Khan showed that a lot of Korean migrants achieved high
positions in the Soviet administration and state economy, but the
emergence of post-Soviet states pushed many of them out of their
privileged ranks and sometimes forced them to migrate further to
Russia. In his paper, JEAN YOUNG LEE (Incheon, Republic of Korea)
scrutinized the transformation of Korean migrants in Northeast China
during the early phase of the Cold War. In the three periodical stages
of decolonization and nation-building in China and Korea (1.
Liberation and Civil War 1945-1949; 2. Korean War 1950-1953; 3. Social
Reform Period 1953-1957), Lee argues that the ethnic Korean migrants
underwent a change in their status from that of foreigners to an
ethnic minority in the Chinese nation state. This transformation,
however, was not without tension and from the late 1950s onward the
Chinese Government implemented campaigns to integrate the Korean
minority stronger into Chinese nationalism. YOUNG HWAN CHONG (Tokyo)
talked about the legal situation of the Korean diaspora in Japan after
the end of World War II in 1945 throughout the U.S. occupation of
Japan until 1952. Based on an analysis of the Foreigners Registration
Law, Chong identified practices of colonial rule in the administration
of Korean diasporic communities by Japanese authorities even after the
liberation of Korea in 1945. While most of the Korean migrants
originate from the regions which are now part of the North Korean
territory, their struggle for equal civil rights is often neglected by
the South Korean government, whose attitude towards them remains
hostile.

YOU JAE LEE (Tubingen) opened the third panel Cold War and Migration
II with a transnational entangled everyday history of North and South
Korean migrants to East and West Germany during the Cold War period.
Comparing North Korean students in the German Democratic Republic
(GDR) and South Korean mineworkers in Western Germany, Lee questioned
the propagated success stories of Socialist solidarity between North
Korea and the GDR as well as the capitalist development aid program
between South Korea and West Germany. Both processes of educational
and economical exchange resulted not in the desired repercussions to
both Korean countries, but rather created hybrid identities of the
migrants in the Korean Diaspora in both German states. Therefore, Lee
argued that it is important to take a closer look at the everyday
lives of the Korean migrants beyond the meta-narratives shaped by the
coordinates of the Cold War. YONSON AHN (Frankfurt am Main) addressed
another major group of Korean migrants to Germany: she looked at the
12,600 Korean nurses and nurse assistants, who were sent to West
Germany mostly by the South Korean government during the 1960s and
1970s. As Ahn highlighted were aspects of gender most influential for
the identity formation of the nurses in West Germany. NADIA KIM (Los
Angeles, CA) presented her paper Finding Our Way Home: Korean
Americans, Homelands Trips, and Cultural Foreignness, which tackles
the ambivalent experiences of young Korean Americans in their
diasporic communities in the United States. Although Asian Americans
are according to Kim usually positively racialized in the United
States, they face discriminatory problems in the U.S. as well as in
South Korea: on the one hand, Americans perceive American Koreans as
bearing a racial identity as Koreans, while South Koreans honed in on
their American cultural identity on the other hand.

The fourth panel Diaspora Formation and Life World started with a
theoretical presentation on Koreans in China, Japan, and the United
States, in which JI-YEON YUH (Evanston, IL) asked (surprisingly not
earlier in the course of the conference), what does it mean to talk
about Korean diaspora? Yuh stated that approaching Korean diasporas is
most definitely not to locate Korean minorities within particular
nation-states, but rather following studies presented by Robin Cohen,
Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London u.a. 1997. that
diasporic communities and networks are globally and transcending the
coordinates of nation states. Furthermore, it is always necessary to
historicize the Korean diaspora, since its meaning and practice
shifted and changed over time, e.g. from the colonial period to the
postwar era of the Cold War with to separated Korean states. To study
diasporas, however, offers the possibility of crafting a flexible
identity beyond the boundaries of the nation state in the broad
expanse of the global and envisioned as simply belonging. ERIN AERAN
CHUNG (Baltimore, MD) highlighted the two distinct histories of
political incorporation of the Korean diasporic communities in Japan
and the United States. While Koreans in Japan are highly assimilated,
but structurally foreign due to still prevailing restrictive Japanese
citizenship policies, the U.S. granted Korean migrants full
citizenship legally, but racialized them as foreign on linguistically
and cultural distinct basis. Although Korean communities in both
countries were marginalized in different ways, they both developed
strategies of political participation, which shows that we have to
broaden our perspective on citizenship and socio-political
participation of diasporic groups beyond the conventional notion of
their political activism for citizenship acquisition. In the last
paper, DANIEL SCHWEKENDIEK (Seoul) brought attention to the
problematic history of Korean adoption, which is highly important
since South Korea has placed more children for overseas adoption than
any other country in the world. Schwekendiek concluded, however, that
the Korean project of overseas adoption failed, considering that most
Korean adoptees receive psychotherapy, show signs of identity crises
and evolve high suicide rates compared to what Schwekendiek called
other transracial adoptees.

In the final discussion, the pitfalls and chances of approaching
Korean diaspora were addressed. While recent research has put too much
emphasis on the victimization of Koreans which often reproduced a
strong nationalistic understanding of Koreaness through the focus on
ethnic Korean minorities and their often violent migration experiences
(such as forced labor migration during the colonial period), the
analysis of Korean diaspora also offers possibilities to approach
in-between spaces of nation-states and ideologies, as well as the
empowerment of social movements. You Jae Lee therefore advocated to
investigate the everyday practices and agency of people living in the
diaspora, and to write decentralized and trans-national histories
beyond the confines of the nation-state, colonialism and the Cold War.
There was also much agreement on Ji-Yeon Juh's comment that diaspora
is very different from terms like migration or citizenship, because it
involves much more emotions through the homeland fantasies by the
people living in the diaspora. However, as Kien Nghi Ha (Tubingen)
reminded us, it has to be kept in mind that diasporas are never
homogeneous and always shaped by specific power/knowledge formations
in imbalances of center and periphery, such as the issue of European
Asians who are often not acknowledged as Asians living in the
diaspora.

A further pitfall of the concept of diaspora derives from the term
itself, which (as the individual papers and discussions indicated) is
not clearly defined despite the recent boom in diaspora studies which,
however, can be seen as a chance as well. The most apparent
epistemological gap in the application of the still very fuzzy concept
of diaspora remains in the focus on either (1) ethnic distinguished
diaspora formations within seemingly properly defined nation-states or
(2) the comparative and trans-national aspects of human mobility,
hybrid identity practices and their global entanglement beyond
nationalistic and ideological determination. Very thought provoking
was You Jae Lee's comment that diaspora is not solely an academic term
(diaspora as concept), but also a political one used by social
movements in their struggle for civil rights (diaspora as project).
Discussions on Korean diaspora therefore involve further questions of
(global) civil society and global governance, which are not limited to
the coordinates of nationalism, colonialism, and Cold War, and it is
necessary to develop stronger comparative/trans-national/and global
history perspectives to approach the histories of Korean diasporas and
of (both) modern Korea(s).

Conference overview:

Opening: You Jae Lee (Head of Korean Studies, University of Tubingen);
Taejin Yi (President of the National Institute of Korean History);
Jaejin Choi (Korea Foundation, Berlin Office)

Panel 1: Colonialism and Migration; Chair: Klaus Antoni (University of
Tbingen)

Soon Won Park (Sungkyunkwan University): Forced Labour to Japan

Byung Yool Ban (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies): (Re)Migration
of Koreans to Russia and to Central Asia

Wayne Patterson (St. Norbert College): Korean Immigration to Hawaii
and Japanese Imperialism: A New Look at the Imposition of the
Protectorate in 1905

Michael Kim (Yonsei University): The Issue of Citizenship and Family
Register of Korean Migrants in Manchuria

Panel 2: Cold War and Migration I; Chair: Gunter Schubert (University
of Tbingen)

Deug-Joong Kim (National Institute of Korean History): Diaspora in
Korean Peninsula in the Period of State-Building  'Displaced Persons
to North and South Korea', 'Refugees' and their Political Impacts

Valeriy Khan (Academy of Science of Uzbekistan): Life, Identity and
Achievements of Koryo Saram in Central Asia

Jean Young Lee (Inha University): Cold War and its Effect to the
Korean-Chinese Society in China (1945-1957)

Young Hwan Chong (Meiji Gakuin University) The Legal Situation of
Koreans in Japan and Colonialism after the World War II (1945-1952)

Panel 3 Cold War and Migration II; Chair: Sun-ju Choi (University of
Tbingen)

You Jae Lee (University of Tbingen): Development and Solidarity:
Korean Migration to East and West Germany

Yonson Ahn (University of Frankfurt): Yellow Angels: Gender and ethnic
Identities of former Korean nurses in Germany

Nadia Kim (Loyola Marymount University): Finding our Way Home: Korean
Americans, Homeland Trips, and Cultural Foreignness

Panel 4: Diaspora Formation and Life World; Chair: Kien Nghi Ha
(University of Tbingen)

Ji-Yeon Yuh (Northwestern University): Lives at the Crossroads:
Koreans in China, Japan, and the United States

Erin Aeran Chung (Johns Hopkins University): Korean Diasporic
Citizenship: Two Tales of Political Incorporation in Japan and the
United States

Daniel Schwekendiek (Sungkyunkwan University): The History of Korean
Adoption 1950-2000

Panel 5: Final Discussion; Chair: You Jae Lee (University of Tbingen)

Chances and Pitfalls of Korean Diaspora Studies



If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it
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Citation: Robert Kramm-Masaoka. Review of , Korean Diaspora: Beyond
Colonialism and Cold War. H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews. December, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=34925

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