Ghost in the Kitchen: Multiracial Korean Americans (Re)Defining Cultural Authenticity (original) (raw)
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Appetite, 2019
It has been suggested that the linkages among the sensory, memorial and social aspects of culinary symbolism for transnationals are pronounced by particular food preparations. By using direct evidence, the present investigation tests this postulate by seeking to understand the connectivity of kimchi to Korean-American identity and if so, how this functions above and below the surface. Five focus groups were conducted comprised of 35 Korean-American adults. The research was designed around a grounded theory approach with an open-ended grand tour question: How does kimchi affect your sense of identity? Seven themes were uncovered: Recreating Memories-Collectivity, Connectivity and Family; Affirmation of Family Structure; Kimchi Is Love; Territorial Space; Acquired Taste; Cheating Memories-Shame and Sadness; and Female Kitchen Agency and Power Relations. Kimchi has held on through space and time to provide a shared sense of connectivity to the Korean-American informants, perhaps more intensely and more democratically than in Korea, their ethic homeland. Reported kimchi taste acquisition followed a trajectory from aversion to familiarity to longing. The re-negotiation of kimchi's ethno-space in America has led to feelings of shame, guilt and sadness to some. Concessions have been made. Manufactured kimchi provided a common generic bridge to the trans-Korean-American community. However, the move away from home-prepared kimchi has taken a toll on family's historic and structural connectivity, emotions, the deliverance of cultural capital and has affected the distribution of household agency.
Our Place in Someone Else's House: Korean Americans and gendered identity in global/local context
Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, 2004
Author(s): Kim, Nadia | Abstract: In recent years, students of gender and migration have established that ethnic immigrant families and communities are sites of both oppression and resistance. Less is known, however, about how immigrant women respond to their “double-edged” lives; how, in light of cultural globalization, their responses are forged in a global/local context; and what these responses reveal about larger processes of assimilation and transnationalism. As Korean immigrants hail from a country that has had long-standing ties to the US via US imperialist projects starting in World War II, they are a fitting case study of the ways immigrant women in particular wrestle with global/local dimensions of “race”/ethnonationality and gender, of “tradition” and modernity. Drawing from indepth, open-ended interviews with 32 non-immigrants in Seoul and 47 immigrants in Los Angeles County, Kim finds that globalized culture and US experience foster the women’s identification with whit...
Two ways of articulating heterogeneity in Korean American narratives of ethnic identity
Journal of Asian American Studies, 2004
This paper explores the role of language in constructing relational identities among 1.5- and second-generation Korean Americans. Using the methodology of discourse analysis, we reveal two ways of articulating social divisions within the Korean American community among 1.5- and second-generation Korean Americans in Los Angeles. We analyze how their narratives present different ideologies about identity as: 1) an attribute determined by factors not under an individual’s control or 2) an observable accomplishment, capable of being easily modified by individual choice. We analyze the discursive features of these two discourses, which we call the discourse of dispositions and the discourse of agency, and we discuss the implications of this research for theories of race and ethnicity.
The Turn to " Bad Koreans " : Transforming Televisual Ethnicity
This article examines the production and negotiation of Korean American televisual images in U.S. reality and travel food programs. We explore two different representations of Korean Americanness, the first in CNN's Parts Unknown and the second in Bravo TV's Top Chef, to identify the demand for ethnic transformation that Korean Americans face and examine how these trials reanimate the role of Korean Americans on television. We argue that the iconoclastic figure of the " Bad Korean " highlighted in Parts Unknown challenges stereotypical portrayals of Korean Americans by positioning cast members as active and disruptive cultural producers. In our analysis of Top Chef, we focus on the emergence of the " Shifting Korean " to highlight the transformative process demanded by the reality television genre. We conclude by querying the representational possibilities for Korean Americans, asking what claims the " Bad Korean " and " Shifting Korean " can make on cultural authenticity.
Demystifying Americanness: The Model Minority Myth and The Black-Korean Relationship
2020
The recent incidents involving both Black American and Korean American communities across the United States have reopened the old wounds between the two minority communities, recalling the two tragic incidents in the 1990s: the death of Latasha Harlins (1991) and the Los Angeles Uprising/Sa-I-Gu (1992). Revisiting and reevaluating these two cases, this article argues that the myth of true Americanness, channeled and reinforced through the concept of model minority, has not only shaped and sustained a contentious relationship between Korean immigrants and Black Americans but also intensified the racial tension among all racial and ethnic groups in the United States. We conclude that American people of all demographics must debunk the myth of model minority and challenge the false Americanism by embracing "deep diversity," not merely distinctive group identities and outlooks, which offers a more diverse and rich interpretation of America as a whole.
PhD Dissertation, 2024
The dominant narrative of diasporic Korean American history has been founded upon on the narratives the Korean Independence Movement from the continental US and Hawai‘i. It centers the leaders and participants of the movement who began to mobilize diasporic Korean Americans towards a predetermined path of assimilation into US society and global cosmopolitanism – a political subjectivity that reinforces both US and Korea nationalisms. By extension, evocations of the Korean diaspora in academic discourses have also tended to reify territorial, ethnonational, and political boundaries to standardize a singular definition of the Korean diaspora centered on migration, ethnic identification, and connection to the homeland. By contrast, “A different Diaspora” argues that such renderings tell only a partial story by historical tracing various political struggles of diasporic Korean Americans throughout the 20th century (1903-1968) who challenged narratives of compliance and assimilation defined by diasporic Korean American proximity to whiteness. Through their actions, these exiled militarists, scholars, students, and GI deserters of the US armed forces made apparent the limitation of their proximity to whiteness by imagining a different Korean American diaspora removed from the norms of subservience to white American institutions and individuals in positions of power. By placing them at the center of my story, my dissertation argues for a wider conception of the Korean diaspora that accounts for overlooked narratives such as the cultivation of cross-racial solidarities; development of critical understanding of antiblackness, Indigenous dispossession; and participation in projects of demilitarization to resist US imperialism. These enactments of an alternative worldmaking in the Korean American diaspora, practiced however fleetingly, reveal that notions of belonging are not confined by boundaries set by nation-states or the status quo of the racial-social order in the US. This dissertation thus traces what I call insurgent histories of the Korean American diaspora, focusing on how various diasporic Korean Americans at different times and places sought alternative forms of liberation and belonging. It is a genealogy of how diasporic Korean Americans came to understand and imagined beyond their proximity to whiteness to envision a different Korean American diaspora.
Being a Korean Studying Koreans in an American School: Reflections on Culture, Power, and Ideology
Qualitative Report, 2012
Recent debates on situated knowledge highlight the issue of the researcher's position in the research process, challenging the traditional assumption of the insider/outsider dichotomy. Drawing on my fieldwork among Korean immigrant parents in an American school, I describe my shifting positions in negotiation and scrutinize the ways my reflexivity intersects with culture, power relations, and political ideologies in the research process. This self-analysis highlights partial and situated knowledge claims, questioning the author's value-neutral, authoritative voice in texts. I argue that the researcher should critically reflect on her location in the field and articulate how this position influences the research.
Re-Defining National Cuisine : Dietary Practices of Multi-Cultural Families in South Korea
2014
This paper explores the patterns of inter-cultural adaptation and accommodation of dietary practices of ‘multi-cultural families.’ Foreign women married to Korean men compromise in their daily diet between the desire to eat the food of their culture and the need to adapt it to the rest of the Korean family’s expectations. This domain becomes the terrain of fusion of food habits and palates as the ‘border-crossing’ of food and taste more or less freely practiced by the members of these families passes onto their children, thereby requiring new definitions of Korean national cuisine and what it means to be Korean. Based on ethnographic descriptions of the dietary life of multi-cultural families, the paper intends to analyze the meaning of these everyday life experiences in the context of the political and ideological discourses of multiculturalism in contemporary South Korea. It is argued in particular that food provides a meaningful space where the terms of mutual relationships, gend...