| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
|
|
Korean Americans are relatively new in the fabric of American society; hence, their ties with Korean politics, culture, language, and people remain pretty strong. In fact, playing into the tropes of diaspora, the Korean government takes pains to ensure that the link between Koreans in diaspora and the Korean peninsula and the South Korean nationstate stays strong for many reasons, including stanching the brain drain, attracting wealthy investors back to Korea, and creating global cultural, political, and diplomatic networks. Creating a sense of belonging to Korea, even if it is as an imagined place, is one of the ways in which ethnicity becomes integral to identity formation.
Arjun Appadurai (1996), among others, has disputed the notion that there is a singular ethnos of identity, especially when considering the impact of globalization. He wrote,
Increasing connectedness across nationstate borders through various arenas, such as the Internet, media, (im)migration, international organizations, global markets, consumer practices, and travel, has enabled people to forge new identities and identifications beyond the confines of nationstates. A single ethnos, though more realizable in theory than in practice, was not only an ideology but an imperative for emergent nationstates that desired to forge new national identities in the minds of their citizenry to encourage their primary affiliations to be to the nationstate rather than other ethnic or cultural identifications that may have had a longer and more organic history.