Are You North Korean or North Korean Official? (or American?) Korean American Activists’ Developing Alternative Narratives

• In Event: 594 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 15. Narrative and Political Identity

Abstract

This paper examines how diaspora activists introduce alternative narratives about homeland politics that conflict with dominant narratives upheld by the majority of their co-ethnics in the host society. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork at a New York City-based Korean American organization, Peace for South and North Korea (PSNK), I illustrate how its members have wrestled to promote a set of new narratives depicting North Korea not as a threatening country with its aspiration to nuclear weapons but as a country under severe international misunderstanding. In their effort to change the dominant narratives, PSNK members have held events in which they can lead people to rethink how differently past events might be retold (e.g., the 1950 Korean War) and publicize the plights the past events left in the lives of Koreans – not only Korean in the Korean peninsula but also Korean Americans. I show their promotion of alternative narratives often ends up emphasizing their migratory experiences, in effect obscuring their effort to bring more public attention to their movement narratives. The PSNK case, I argue, demonstrates that narratives used in more interactive settings tend to prioritize first-person voice with which narrators are expected to tell either their own stories or the experiences of others, in particular, to whom they are assumed to be very close.

Author

• Eunkyung Song, State University of New Jersey-Rutgers