Youngshik Bong
"State Policymaking Behavior and the Island Disputes in East Asia: ROK-Japanese Dispute on Tokto/Takeshima"
University of Pennsylvania
Scholars in international relations have identified territorial disputes as an enduring feature of international politics and the principal source of conflict leading to war throughout history. With the end of the superpower rivalry during the Cold War, territorial disputes have increasingly concerned political scientists and policy makers as one of the primary sources of conflict among nations.
East Asia, like other parts of the world, is not outside the shadow of territorial dispute. Since the end of the Cold War, unresolved territorial issues among Asian states have been recognized as potential triggers of interstate conflicts. Such recognition appears to be warranted by a series of recent events in which countries adamantly pushed their sovereign claims over disputed islands in the East Sea/Sea of Japan and the South China Sea.
For the most part, scholars and policy analysts alike seem to accept as a given that countries will do anything to win their sovereign claims over disputed territory. One view, largely informed by historical and cultural approaches in international relations, emphasizes the influence of culture and historical memory among East Asian countries on their hostile policy behavior. The other view, based upon realist assumptions on state behavior in a quest for power and security under international anarchy, largely posits a pessimistic assessment of state behavior in territorial disputes.
Contrary to these assumptions, the outcomes of territorial disputes seem to vary in reality. There have been a few territorial disputes between East Asian states that suggest that the states do not always blindly hold onto their sovereign claims over territory. The patterns of state policies in territorial disputes are quite varied and complex across situations, although the official rhetoric of territorial policies usually sounds belligerent and adamant.
In this paper, I will examine the relative strengths of conventional modes of explanations focusing on three variables: Ideational, external, and domestic variables. Relying on insights provided by the two-level game model, I will suggest an alternative way of explaining the variations in territorial policy. I will argue that a state's territorial policy is made by the state elites' utility calculations of the policy for their political goals at both international and domestic levels. State elites will use territorial issues as a means to enhance their political visibility and legitimacy before their domestic constituents. Conversely, state elites will downplay their territorial policies when they need to enhance their country's overall security. In this regard, a territorial policy is a balancing act by state elites between their external security restraints and their need to boost domestic power positions. State elites constantly shift their choice of territorial policy according to the constraints and incentives generated by both their domestic and international environments.
I will investigate the 1996-8 Tokto/Takeshima dispute between South Korea and Japan to test the comparative advantages of my approach and its limits. I will attempt to answer two major questions. First, why have both Japan and South Korea fought for such small islands for such A long time? What explains the reasons that states remain unyielding and hostile regarding a territory with seemingly diminutive values? On the other hand, both South Korea and Japan have demonstrated different patterns of policy behavior at different times in dealing with the Tokto/Takeshima issue. These patterns include overt demonstration of force, bilateral negotiations, unilateral indifference, and International Court of Justice jurisdiction. What explains these variations in states' territorial policies? With these questions in mind, I will delineate implications to other theoretical models and island disputes in East Asia.
Soo-Jung Lee
"Changing Discourse on and Identities of Separated (North-South) Family Members: The Case of the 1998 MBC Reunion Program"
University of Illinois
After being elected president of South Korea in 1997, Kim Dae Jung declared the reunion of separated family members across the two Koreas as one of the most important tasks for his administration. In fact, the very existence of separated family members and their inability to even verify their family members' whereabouts have been long considered a dramatic symbol of the tragedy of Korean national division which, in turn, is a legacy of the Cold-War era. Some Korean official discourses have argued that while South Korea has always approached the issue of family reunion in the spirit of "humanitarianism," North Korea has no will to resolve the problem, regarding it as a political matter. Thus, it is promulgated that North Korea is primarily responsible for perpetuating the tragedy.
However, the issue of separated family members has never been politically uncharged even in South Korea. For example, the discourses on separated family members in South Korea have been focused on the agonies of Silhyangmin (those who lost their homeland/ those who came south), and in so doing have silenced the existence/stories of the families of Wolbukcha (people who went north). And in these discourses, Silhyangmin have been positioned as "division subjects" -- living proof of the cruelty of North Korea and the superiority of South Korea.
With global and local changes such as the end of the Cold-War and the democratization of South Korea, the discourses on and lives of separated family have been transformed. For example, separated family members have been able to meet their family members through private brokers mainly in China. At the same time, the stories of Wolbukcha (those who went to north) are appearing publicly for the first time. Separated family members (especially Silhyangmin) have responded these changes variously. While some see these changes as signs of hope, others are frustrated because they unsettle the rules or grammar of the world in which they have been produced as "division subjects."
My paper, a part of my dissertation on Silhyangmin identities and Korean nationalism, analyzes a broadcasting program for the reunion of separated family members aired by MBC in 1998. The program was, as MBC proudly argued, the first public attempt to link separated family members beyond the border of South Korea. The program featured many stories which would have been unimaginable but a few years ago. In my analysis, I focus particularly on the many contradictory narratives and the way in which the audience Silhyangmin responded to them. These narratives include stories of Silhyangmin which are not framed by anti-communism; stories of Wolbukcha; a North Koran submarine's infiltration of South Korea's territorial sea; Chung Chu-yong's return from his historic visit to North Korea with 500 head of cattle; separated family members' reunions in China, North Korea, and even in the US. I argue that this program is "diagnostic" in that it reveals ongoing contests and conflicts between different discourses in the midst of local and global political transformation in the late twentieth century.
Hyun Chool Lee & Byung-ok Kil
"The Political Construction of the State and Political Legitimacy in the Case of South Korea"
Konkuk University and Kent State University
Theoretical conceptions of political legitimacy reflect vastly diverse assumptions about the capacity and functions of political legitimacy in any given societies. Some scholars treat political legitimacy in a Weberian bounded, rational, and completely autonomous sense. Others understand it in Marxian terms, within the all-encompassing domination of society or in a relatively autonomous fashion. Contrary to either the state-centered or the society-oriented understandings, this paper attempts to understand how meanings of political legitimacy are shaped over time and space. Specifically, applied to the South Korea's unification policy, the central question is, how, under what conditions, political legitimacy of the state has been constructed? By what political means is political legitimacy constructed? How does South Korea introduce certain actions as legitimate today that are different from the past? To answer these questions, this paper utilizes a historical-comparative approach, which explores a distinctively modern style or 'art of government' that has universalizing effects toward its constituencies. It aims to explain how the notion of political legitimacy is conceptualized or justified in a particular political context of South Korea. This inquiry contends that a multiplicity of meanings of political legitimacy is the result of historical or social constructions.
Panel Two: TONGHAK MOVEMENT
Moderator:
Carter J. Eckert
Professor of Modern Korean History, Harvard University
Director, Korea Institute
Carl Young
"Tonghak After the Tonghak Rebellion, 1895-1901"
University of London
The Tonghak movement and its successor, Ch'ondogyo, were important in several events in late 19th and early 20th century Korea, chiefly in the Tonghak Rebellion of 1894 and the March 1, 1919 demonstrations against Japanese colonial rule. Most studies on these two movements focus on these two events. Few focus on the period in between. This is likely because most studies concentrate on Tonghak and Ch'ondogyo's role in the construction of a national vision for Korea and this period is not particularly useful for this purpose. However, this was a period of major social, political and cultural change in Korea. These changes also affected the Tonghak movement, as the name change to Ch'ondogyo in 1906 suggests. Even a cursory examination of the demands of the Tonghak rebels and the manifestoes of the 1919 demonstrations shows that there was a change not only in their demands because of the radically changed conditions in Korean society, but also in the language and framework of ideas used to support these demands.
This paper proposes to focus on events within Tonghak right after the 1894 rebellion. This was a period of great hardship for Tonghak because government persecutions after the rebellion smashed its organisation and forced its leadership that was not killed into hiding. Some topics I will cover are the reconstruction of Tonghak's religious organisation, the leadership struggles that led to Son Pyong-hui becoming the third Tonghak patriarch, and the events leading to his exile in Japan in 1901. Tonghak influence on other movements of the period will also be discussed.
This period would have a lasting impact on the Tonghak and later Ch'ondogyo organisations. I will assess the impact that this period had on later events that helped prepare the way for Ch'ondogyo's participation in the March 1 movement and Son Pyog-hui's titular leadership of the movement.
Panel Three: LITERARY IMAGINATIONS
Moderator:
David R. McCann
Professor of Korean Literature, Harvard University
Grace Koh
"Vision and Reconstruction of History through the Use of Literary Imagination in the Samguk Yusa"
Oxford University
As a genre, the Samguk yusa is difficult to place within the Koryo literary tradition. It is technically both oral and recorded literature owing to its inclusion of songs, foundation myths, legends, and anecdotes that were gathered by oral transmission and transcribed by Iryon in his time. It cannot be categorized as one particular genre as it combines historical, religious, and poetic narratives. The writing system used is classical Chinese, but its usage is not rigid and refined in grammar and style like in most extant works by the author's contemporaries. Owing to its erratic structural organization, odd stylistic qualities, and wide range of themes, the Samguk yusa has been often regarded as an incomplete or eccentric piece of work.
While accurate names, dates, places, and course of events may be the essence of history, these details in and of themselves cannot portray the spirit of the time and culture in question. Unlike other 'complete' collections or conventional history texts, the Samguk yusa captures the spirit of the past by retaining individual fragments that are in essence unpolished or uncorrupted by the rules of traditional literary style, and delicately weaves them together to produce a colorful historical brocade.
My paper will discuss and analyze Iryon's vision and reconstruction of history through the use of literary imagination, and how, through its unique narrative and odd structure, the text aims to examine its subject matter critically while preserving the original spirit which it embodies. My paper will also argue that, while being an invaluable source depicting aspects of history and religion of the Three Kingdoms period, the Samguk yusa is in essence a work of literature as opposed to a history book or religious text.
Jiwon Shin
"Dance of Agony: Anso Kim Ok's Translations of Symbolist Poetry"
Harvard University
Hailed by his contemporaries as the maitre of the young poets, Anso Kim Ok published his collection of translations of European symbolist poetry, Dance of Agony, in 1921. In the words of a later poet, writing poetry is 1920s Korea entailed dancing along the dance of agony. This collection is indicative of the moment of anxiety-ridden experimentation with poetry; the dance of agony meant choreographing the steps to be taken on a path fraught with experimental danger, between metric formalism and semantic indulgence. These agonizing steps mark nothing less than a critical juncture in the process of production of modern poetics in the history of Korean poetry. I examine one of the poems in the collection, "Autumn Song (Kaul ui norae)," a translation of Paul Verlaine's "Chanson D'Automne." Instead of focusing on observing the continuity and discontinuity between the original and the translation, I discuss Anso's translation as a text in which new modes of representation emerged, were disseminated and even proffered sihon, both the poetic spirit and poetry of the spirit, of the next decades to come.
Panel Four: REPRESENTING PRE-MODERN IDENTITIES
Moderator:
Milan Hejtmanek
Professor of Pre-Modern Korean History, Harvard University
Joy Kim
"Recasting Slavery (Nobi-je) in Korean History"
Columbia University
The institution of slavery in Korea, until its abolition in 1894, has been an integral part of Korean history, and slavery during the Choson dynasty was fully sanctioned by the government as an indispensable and natural manifestation of hereditary social classification. Choson slaves, who occupied the lowest legal stratum of the society, were not only the chief agricultural producers, but they were also the key symbolic capital of the elites in determining their socioeconomic position. Despite this meaningful relationship between the ruling elite and slaves, recent scholarship on Korean slavery has yet to explore the complexities of Choson slavery as an institution, especially the relationship between theory and praxis. Many scholars of Korean slavery have yet to depart from the historiographical consequences of Marxist structuralist interpretation of class and status. The main goal of this paper is to clearly understand the historiographical trends in the recent scholarship on slavery and, in so doing, argue for the needs to reconceptualize the "slavery-question" in Korean history.
Bonnie Kim
"Corrupt Functionaries, Institutional Breakdown, or Bad Weather? Varied Approaches to Dating the Sillan Census Register"
Columbia University
In a previous paper titled, "An analysis and Translation of a Sillan Shosoin Census Register," presented last year at Harvard's Korean Studies Graduate Student Conference, I provided a general overview of the document in question, a survey of four unified Sillan villages, with intent to elicit a clearer understanding of the highly fragmented text from a specific historical framework. However, among the myriad problems posed by the register, alongside the relative dearth of secondary research available on this topic, the temporal issue of dating in particular, has generated varied opinion and argumentation from historians in the field. Namely, scholars such as Yi Ki-baik have presumed that the document was recorded in the mid eighth century, while others, including Yi In-chol have proposed the mid to late ninth cent. as well as earlier periods, in the attempt to isolate and identify the register with specific institutions and socio-economic phenomena of unified Silla.
With this in mind, i shall attempt, in my paper, to examine carefully the arguments of several scholars while paying close attention to their methodological approaches. From this I hope to raise my own question s on the issue of dating from a contemporary historiographical perspective.
En Young Ahn
"Problems in the Study of Traditional Korean Aesthetics"
Monash University
This paper will discuss the problems in the study of the traditional Korean aesthetics through an analysis of the recent Korean publication on Korean art, art history and aesthetics.
The paper will summarize problems in the study of the traditional Korean aesthetics, which have been identified by Korean art historians and scholars as following:
The first problem is that in discussing the traditional Korean aesthetics, most of Korean publications fail to accommodate the art of the ordinary people and women and refer the traditional Korean aesthetics narrowly to the official one, more associated with male and Yanban or the elite class. It will be argued that this problem is caused by the empirical and materialist approaches which were introduced by Japanese study of Korean art carried out as part of Japanese colonial projects and have continuously been adopted by Korean’s study of Korean art until today. Since most research on Korean art history has been based exclusively on the written texts and art objects, they neglected or excluded the unwritten art of the ordinary people and women with comparatively poor quantity of remaining examples.
The second problem is that the empirical and materialist approaches led Korean study of Korean art to an essentialist approach to the definition of tradition in which tradition was defined problematically as something intact or frozen.
The third problem is that in discussing the traditional Korean aesthetics, most of Korean publications neglected continuous contribution of traditional Korean art, for example, calligraphy which had contributed significantly to Korean culture and has still sustained its contribution to the contemporary Korean art and yet did not accord with Western definition of the work of art. This problem resulted in the adoption, by Koreans, of the Western notion of aesthetics via Japan without questioning its translatability into their local context. Further, the theoretical framework of Korean contemporary academic disciplines, such as aesthetics, philosophy of art, art criticism, art history and visual arts practice have been founded and constructed through translating Western discourses. These factors led Koreans to accept an argument that there was no autonomous pursuit of aesthetics in traditional Korean literature, as was the case in the West or China. In fact, Korea actually produced a substantial amount of art theory and criticism during the Choson Dynasty (1392-1910).
In conclusion, it will be argued that it is necessary for Korean studies of the traditional Korean aesthetics to develop a new framework which is able to accommodate the art of the ordinary people and women, and to evaluate traditional Korean art theory and criticism which may not be recognized by Western tradition.
Richard King
"Documentary Sources on Kaya: A Survey of Extant Records"
Oxford University
The purpose of this paper is to examine the documents available for the study of the history of Kaya.
In my paper I will start with a brief survey of the primary sources available relating to Kaya, describing the format, origin, and content of the documents. Then, using these sources, I will describe an outline history of Kaya, paying particular attention to similarities and discrepancies between the sources.
Next, I will explain the major themes in the study of the history of Kaya, including from when we can use the word "Kaya", whether we can see an early and late Kaya, Kaya's relations with its neighbours, and the significance of Imna. I shall examine the relevance of my sources to these questions.
I shall use all the primary sources collected in Kayasa saryojipsong, compiled by Kim T'aesik and Yi Ikju, including, but not limited to, the Samguk Sagi, the Samguk Yusa, the Sanguo-zhi, and the Nihon Shoki. The Kayasa saryojipsong is a comprehensive collection of sources produced in China, Japan, and Korea relating to Kaya. It also includes later sources, produced during the Choson period, but these will not be included in my analysis.
Panel Five: COLONIAL CRITIQUES AND POST-COLONIAL PERCEPTIONS
Moderator:
Vipan Chandra
Professor of History, Wheaton College
Somei Kobayashi
"GHQ/SCAP's Perception Toward Korean Residents in Japan: 1945-1948"
Hitotsubashi University
After the World War II, GHQ/SCAP (the General Headquarters / Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) was founded, and started a reorientation program toward the Japanese people. For the first time, GHQ/SCAP regarded the Korean residents in Japan as "the liberated citizens", but their perception toward the Korean residents in Japan changed as "Japanese citizens" around 1947. The GHQ/SCAP caused a violent oppression against the Korean Leftist in Japan due to their "Communism" activities, and this tendency accelerated day by day.
This study attempts to analyze the GHQ/SCAP's perception for the Leftist Korean residents in Japan, which has been neglected in the Korean Studies. It covers the liberation from the Imperialism of Japanese Occupation to the establishment of South- North Korea separate regimes in 1948. This, especially, focuses on the political pursuit concerned homeland situation and what political pursuit can be done for the Korean residents in Japan.
As a method of research, I had analyzed the GHQ/SCAP records censored by GHQ/SCAP and also a galley proof of Korean press (newspapers and magazines) in Japan. According to these materials, GHQ/SCAP had condemned most of the articles submitted to the censorship to suppress and delete because of "Communism" and "Criticism of Allied Powers." GHQ/SCAP had oppressed them by the reason of "Communism". It seems that GHQ/SCAP' s oppression reflects the change in occupation policy "reverse course" or "gear change" caused by threat of Communism in the Soviet Union. Despite this reason, I strongly feel that was another reason why GHQ/SCAP tried to oppress the Korean residents in Japan.
The Korean residents in Japan oppressed by "Communism" and "Criticism of Allied Powers" insists on aiming an 'establishment of a unified state by the national independent power'. Some political groups, like the Korean members in the Japan Communist Party, aimed this establishment by the means of communism in order to achieve their desire possibly caused by the hardship in history. However, under the name of "Communism", GHQ/SCAP had oppressed this desire with the ways of Non-Communism. In other words, because of "Communism", GHQ/SCAP had blockaded the trends of Korean residents in Japan toward the establishing a unified state.
After the liberation, Korean residents in Japan and the Korean activists in Japan had returned to Korea one after another. Therefore, from the viewing of migration, Korean residents in Japan were actively related to Korean residents in the Korean peninsula. Also, the Korean political groups in Japan were closely connected with the Korean political groups in Korea. Considering the close relationship between Koreans in Japan and in Korea, this study is an important key point in considering the meaning of Korean "Leftist " in Korea recognized by the U.S and Korean peoples' political pursuit in Korean peninsula called the "ripe of revolution".
Chiho Sawada
"Heavy Brains, Hairy Bodies, and Higher Civilization: Namgung Byok's Critique of Japan's Cultural Assimilation Policy in Colonial Korea"
Harvard University
With the eruption of the March First (1919) uprisings in colonial Korea, the Japanese regime in Seoul (Keij)the Government-General of Korea (GGK) came under unprecedented scrutiny. In particular, the colonial regimes "cultural assimilation" (dka) policy was revealed to be a tangle of ambivalence and inconsistencies. My presentation explores tensions in assimilation policy and practice by focusing, first, on internal debates within the GGK prior to the rise of March First, and, secondly, on a Korean poets critique of assimilation policy. Within the GGK, consensus on the definition and methods of assimilation had proven illusive. Differences of opinion over priorities produced a hodgepodge curriculum for state schools. As a compromise, colonial officials agreed to disagree, and schools offered a pinch of lessons on "loyalty to emperor," a dash of "industry and thrift," a sprinkling of vocational training and rudimentary Japanese, and so on. Curricular guidelines were sufficiently vague that individual instructors could interpret them in a variety of ways, varying the proportions in the assimilation recipe to suite his/her taste. So it was that centrifugal forces wracked a putatively centralizing endeavor. A decade after the formal annexation of Korea by Japan (in August 1910), colonial education policy remained distended and tension-fraught, a work in progress irritating many and satisfying few.
In July 1919 Namgung Byok, an ethnic Korean poet and intellectual living in Tokyo, published a scathing critique of colonial assimilation policy in one of Imperial Japans most prominent magazines. Although Namgung argued that forced unidirectional "assimilation"in other words, "Japan-ization"was bound to fail, he suggested the possibility of a partially assimilated Korean identity within the Imperial framework. For assimilation policy to have any credibility whatsoever, Namgung emphasized that ethnic Korean members of Empire must be given full access to institutions of higher education, and that inter-ethnic marriage should be encouraged. But Namgung's depiction of partial assimilation contained many ambiguities as well. Overall, I shall engage in a reading of his critique to explore the idea of a Creole colonial culture and identity in immediate post-March First Korea.
Scott Swaner
"Historiography and Fact or Ideology and Fetish? Looking Back at the Japanese Annexation of Korea"
Harvard University
Jon Halliday aptly sums up the historiographic quagmire surrounding Japans annexation of Korea, its motives, and its effects: Japans gradual seizure of Korea has become one of the most contentious political issues in the study of modern Japan. About the only fact not in dispute is that Japan did actually seize Korea. We know the annexation of Korea occurred, that Japan annexed other countries as well (Taiwan, parts of China, Manchuria), and that Japans expansionist activity from the late 19th century until 1945 was imperialist in nature. But then, what do we mean when we use such terms as seizure, penetration, and even imperialism?
This essay explores questions of what constitutes correct historiographic approaches to interpreting events, or rather, to what extent such interpretations are possible; what are some of the pitfalls attendant to the project of re-creating narratives in our efforts to explain the past and, in a sense, justifying certain professional methodological approaches; and, to what extent the project of historiography is scientifically possible. In this manner it addresses the more general problems of documentary fetishism and disciplinary ideologies and attempts to provide a tentative initial framework for how to write history with the appropriate sensitivity given to both the science of history and the flights of theory, as they are often thought. As a case in point, the essay takes the Japanese annexation of Korea and the related English-language historiography and uses it as a means to work through the above questions. While surveying the pertinent works of M.F. Nelson, Hilary Conroy, M.N. Pak, Peter Duus, Donald Calman, and Marius Jansen, I ask: what are the dominant and marginal historiographic views explaining the annexation and the Japanese motivations for it? Why have certain views gained hegemony in the field of Asian studies and what factors inherent in the scholarly pursuit of historical study allow for such a hierarchy of interpretations? Is it indeed the case that the hegemonic view of what happened is the correct version, the one that has mustered the greatest quantity and quality of empirical data in support of its thesis? Or is it perhaps more accurate to say, with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that tout objet historique est ftiche?
In response to the latter alternative, this essay offers an examination of how the Korean case has been written about, along with a critique informed by two critical concepts developed by Marx: ideology and fetishism. As Merleau-Ponty correctly notes, the work of history its excavating, sifting, and attempts to re-assemble the pastis always somewhat dependent on fetishization. The so-called truth behind a thing must be ignored in our concerted efforts to foreground what has obscured it. In other words, the documentary and the historiographic become the truth, and historys essential absences and elisions are often swept aside by sententious historians. I have written this essay with the hope of bringing these questions into a public forum for reconsideration by the scholars in our field.
Sue Jean Cho
"Outside the Diasporic Paradigm: The 'Atypical' Experience of Koreans in America"
Harvard University
The prevailing literature that exists on Korean diasporic communities in the United States often confines itself by trying to fit within the patterns of immigration that have been defined and delineated by many of today's scholars. When studying Korean immigration to the United States, on is taught that there were three distinct waves, each with its own unique characteristics. The first wave came at the turn of the century as workers on Sugar cane plantations in Hawaii. The second wave came soon after the Korean War in the 1950s. Finally, wave three arrived in the late 1960s and through the 1980s following the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and during the height of the glorification of the United States and the "American Dream" of wealth and social mobility.
As I read on each of these groups of immigrants, I realized that my parents and other Korean immigrants that I knew did not fit into one of these neatly arranged categories. If anything, this categorization diminished the significance of those who did not fall into one of the aforementioned groups. The danger, thus lies in overgeneralizing and consequently identifying a member of the Korean diaspora solely on their place within the continuum of the waves of immigration. The perils of such categorization become manifest when the entire diasporic group is portrayed as a homogeneous community. Even renowned scholars as Bruce Cumings can be caught falling into such a trap. In his book "Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History," he does concede that there exists "heterogeneous complexity of thousands of individual Americans who happen to be of Korean extraction." However, he regresses by stating that "Korea, as we have learned, is an ethnically homogeneous nation...The perceived purity of the minjok, the ethnic people, gives to them a long and continuous history, culture, durability of which Koreans are deeply proud." One can not completely buy Cumings's first assertion of the heterogeneity of Koreans in America, as the 'legacy' of homogeneity in the statement impededs any pursuit by Koreans, especially diasporic Koreans, of shedding themselves of this image of belonging to a static, homogeneous community.
Hence in this paper, I will argue that the limitations imposed by the categorization of the Korean diaspora into the "three waves of immigration" undermine the experiences of those who can not identify themselves as part of any of the waves. My intention here is not to topple the existing three waved structure, but rather to examine alternative ways in which Korean immigration and diaspora communities can be defined.
