The effect of social identity on integration of social minorities: The case of North Korean refugees in South Korea

This paper investigates the effect of a shared social identity on social behaviors of a marginalized population by focusing on North Korean refugees in South Korea. The findings of a behavioral experiment with North Korean refugees show that the common Korean identity can promote their integration in South Korea, despite considerable differences caused by seven-decade long separation between the two countries. Perceiving ethnic unity shared with South Koreans stimulates North Koreans’ socially desirable behaviors and attitudes such as trust, cooperation, confidence, and life satisfaction in South Korea, as well as their self-confidence about North Korean origin. In addition, the effect of the shared identity is greater for women and better educated persons – the finding that stresses the importance of education and gender-specific policy to accelerate social integration of North Korean refugees.

Towards Spectacular Nationality: Media Production of Korean Nationality through the 2002 World Cup

<p>This paper explores the role of the media in the production of Korean nationality during the 2002 World Cup. It suggests that the media coverage helped organise a spectacle of consumption, which became the primary means by which Korean nationality was articulated and understood. This study brings together research in media and Korean studies and aims to contribute to a timely understanding of nationality that recognises both its intimate connection with media and consumer culture and its normative and taxonomic function. The study elaborates a hybrid theoretical framework of a ‘system of signs’, which draws from Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and normalisation and the ideas of spectacle and simulacrum by Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard. The study examines two key cases of nationality production. Firstly, the ‘Red Devils’ and millions of street supporters that celebrated Korean victories were appropriated by the media to produce internally oriented affirmations of Korean identity and values that doubled as an entertainment spectacle. Secondly, the cult of admiration around the foreign manager Hiddink demonstrated how discourses of globalisation contribute to a social imaginary of global nationalities that compelled Koreans to judge their own nationality against the standards of the sŏnjin’guk (‘advanced nations’).</p>

Towards Spectacular Nationality: Media Production of Korean Nationality through the 2002 World Cup

<p>This paper explores the role of the media in the production of Korean nationality during the 2002 World Cup. It suggests that the media coverage helped organise a spectacle of consumption, which became the primary means by which Korean nationality was articulated and understood. This study brings together research in media and Korean studies and aims to contribute to a timely understanding of nationality that recognises both its intimate connection with media and consumer culture and its normative and taxonomic function. The study elaborates a hybrid theoretical framework of a ‘system of signs’, which draws from Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and normalisation and the ideas of spectacle and simulacrum by Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard. The study examines two key cases of nationality production. Firstly, the ‘Red Devils’ and millions of street supporters that celebrated Korean victories were appropriated by the media to produce internally oriented affirmations of Korean identity and values that doubled as an entertainment spectacle. Secondly, the cult of admiration around the foreign manager Hiddink demonstrated how discourses of globalisation contribute to a social imaginary of global nationalities that compelled Koreans to judge their own nationality against the standards of the sŏnjin’guk (‘advanced nations’).</p>

Different Cinematic Interpretations of Ch’unhyangjŏn: The Same Korean Identity

The article examines the classic Korean folklore fable, 춘향전 (春香傳), Ch’unhyangjŏn (The Fragrance of Spring), The Tale of Ch’unhyang, through the lens of three different successful movie adaptations produced in North and South Korea. Respectively, Yu Wŏn-chun and Yun Ryong-gyu portrayed The Tale of Ch’unhyang (1980) in its modest “Juche realist” North Korean film style, whereas Im Kwŏn-t’aek depicted his work, Ch’unhyang (2000), in a contemporary liberally and daringly revised version, while the romantic portrayal produced in North Korea by the South Korean film director, Shin Sang-ok, in Love, Love, My Love (1984), is performed from a human-oriented and entertaining perspective filled with musical ingredients and brave images of love. The study aims to demonstrate how the story is diversely interpreted through the two divided film cultures by highlighting differences between collectivism and individualism, noting also that all three interpretations emerge from similar roots of cultural and national identity.

Symmetry, Violence, and The Handmaiden's Queer Colonial Intimacies

The Japanese annexation of Korea (1910–45) implicates a crisis of representation in South Korean national history. Both the traumatic wounds and complex intimacies of Japan's rule over its Korean subjects were met with postcolonial suppression, censorship, and disavowal. This article examines Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi, South Korea, 2016), a period film set in 1930s Korea under Japanese rule, in relation to the two nations’ fraught but interconnected colonial and postcolonial histories. By analyzing the film's explicit sexual depiction through discourses of ethnicity, gender, and nation, it argues that the lesbian sex scenes encode and eroticize latent anxieties and tensions surrounding Japan-Korea relations, making explicit the ambivalent longing and lingering identification shared between the colonizers and the colonized. Furthermore, through intertextual reference to the intertwined and imitative relations between the national cinemas of Japan and Korea—relations mediated and elided by a long history of state censorship—Park's film repudiates an essentialist South Korean identity propped up by both nationalist narratives and market liberalization policies. Through palimpsestic projection of the colonial era onto South Korea's neoliberal present, the film invites parallels between colonialism's unresolved legacy and contemporary modes of cultural production. Simultaneously, the film offers a utopian vision of a national self that surfaces—rather than suppresses—the violence and pleasure incurred in confrontations with the colonial or transnational other.

On ‘being Australian’: Korean migrants in ‘post-multicultural’ Australia.

This paper reports on the findings of research into what Korean Australians thought about the process of ‘becoming and being Australian’, drawing on measures of social cohesion and ‘Australianness’. The aim of the research was to find out what Korean Australian migrants valued or were uncomfortable with in relation to multiculturalism and processes of ‘being Australian’, or conformation with ‘Australianness’. Based on in-depth interviews with ten and a survey of 153 members of the Korean migrant community in Sydney, data indicated that social activities and self-perception of identity effectively continue to reflect past Australian policy settings that recognised the importance of multiculturalism as both a community-based policy framework as well as a national social policy. The study found participants highly valued Korean identity, language and community and that bonds to the Korean community, limited English language competency and experiences of racism reinforced the importance of settling into a society that valued multiculturalism.

Double-Ventriloquism and Aegyo in Overwatch

This chapter considers how South Korean identity is represented in the online video game Overwatch through a close reading of the character D.Va. The term “double-ventriloquism” is proposed to explain the simultaneous representation of South Korean youth culture and an assumed North American player within D.Va’s vocal utterances. Through the combination of the audio generated by the game engine and the actions of the player, D.Va communicates messages of instruction, cheer, and defeat. Speaking through action and flavor dialogue, D.Va becomes recognizable as a sexy, cute, young, and techno-forward character whose character and persona the player audience connects with. However, they remain ignorant of the combined corporate and political interests of the creators. This chapter argues that, through “double ventriloquism,” D.Va manifests both North American game company Blizzard Entertainment’s (which owns Overwatch) financial interest and the South Korean state’s interest in exporting Korean cool to an American audience.”

Storming off the tracks: Zombies, high speed rail and South Korean identity in Train to Busan

This article focuses on how the recent blockbuster hit Train to Busan (Yeon 2016), in transposing the zombie horror genre into the South Korean setting, allows South Korean history and social context to actively shape the manner in which it appropriates a genre largely untested by the local film industry. It argues that the film uses genre as a global vernacular through which to speak of specifically Korean issues (in particular, the Korean War, and the issues of South Korea’s speed-oriented Ppalli-Ppalli culture), and locates such practice within the broader context of contemporary South Korean cinema.

Language, Cultural Identities, and Multiculturalism in Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker: A Sociological Perspective

Deep into the novel, an inarticulate sense of unease in the psyche of Henry Park is explored being extremely disturbed, and an outcast. Trapped being in American-Korean identity, he has got his impression on his wife, Lilia beings ‘emotional alien’, ‘yellow peril: neo-American,’ ‘stranger/follower/traitor/spy’. In addition, she speaks of him being a ‘False speaker of Language’ because Henry looks listening to her attentively; following her executing language word by word like someone resembling a non-native speaker. In fact, the cultural differences between the Korean-American and the Native American bring tension around the ways the English language is used.