Diasporic Conjuring: Agency, Spirit, and Politicized Belonging in Transnational Korean Community Organizing

• In Event: 1540 - Community

Abstract

Recent feminist and queer scholarship on embodiment, affect, and sensation suggests that human agency is spatially distributed and temporally embedded, complicating the debates on identity and belonging. Meanwhile, as critical geographers illustrate, social production of space and place is embedded in power relations. These theoretical insights inform my sociological analysis of politicized belonging among diasporic Korean community organizers, including Korean Americans, transnational adoptee Koreans, and Zainichi Koreans (Koreans in/from Japan). Based on ethnographic research with five U.S.-based grassroots Korean community organizations and in-depth interviews with 23 key individuals involved in those organizations, I examine how the organizers draw on their embodied experiences as women, queer, and non-binary folks to imagine a politicized diasporic community. I focus on key affective moments of diasporic experiences involving five individuals, such as not having to explain ourselves, feeling legitimate for our feelings, creating knowledge relationally, and finding each other and feeling full together. Their powerful experiences of difference emerge from the contradictions of hegemonic Korean nationalism, Japanese and U.S. imperialisms, and heteropatriarchy. Building on the debates on hauntings, I call these moments diasporic conjuring to highlight how the community organizers’ embodied, affective, and even spiritual experiences transform Koreanness as a force of politicized belonging. I argue that the conjuring work of diasporic Koreans necessitates a renewed understanding of agency, subjectivity, and social change as spiritually mediated. Viewing diaspora as a political and spiritual confluence, therefore, enables a rigorous critique of violent nation-state borders based on a de-centered re-imagination of the sacred relationships between identity and place, subjectivity and territoriality, and life and land.

Author

• Haruki Eda, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey