| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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The politics of representation was the driving force behind Visweswaran’s Fictions of Feminist Ethnography—those being that the struggle between how we represented ourselves and how we were being represented by agents of power and domination (or, if we are anthropologists, how we enact this struggle) determined the identities that we created.
Defining herself through the hyphenated identity of “second-generation,” Visweswaran addressed the issues of cultural and generational conflict. Although Visweswaran defined the generation label used here in terms of lineage, her focus lay more on how spaces were occupied in terms of race, ethnicity, immigration, family, and so on. The dilemmas that arose from competing frameworks of identity were explored through the interpretation of Krishnan’s documentary Knowing Her Place, which traced the journey of an Indian woman through America in affirming her duality (Visweswaran, 1994, pp. 123–127). While Visweswaran rejected plurality of identity as a disposable commodity, she nonetheless showed that identities were formed through the occupation of multiple spaces, with the caveat that these spaces were not merely chosen but impacted by colonial, post-colonial and neocolonial prescription as well.
As Lowe, Narayan, and Visweswaran have shown in this section, identities are in flux and cannot be pinned down simply in terms of generation, location, or priomordialism. The spatial and temporal mobility of human capital produce multiple subjectivities that shift constantly. Therefore, rather than viewing Koreans in the United States as affected only in terms of how they construct themselves as ethnic beings in the context of the United States, it is crucial to understand how they traverse multiple subjectivities spatially and temporally.
Transnational Communities and (Re)Conceptualizations of Koreanness
In understanding transnational communities, it is important to situate the concept in relation to the framework of diaspora or the global dispersal of a people from a single region. One South Korean study (Lee, 2000) estimated that about 5.5 million people of Korean descent live in diaspora, spanning over 140 nationstates worldwide.