| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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The hyphenated identity of Korean American is often challenged and at times rejected as an oversimplified notion of ethnic identity that is imposed upon people of Korean descent living in the United States by the mainstream, an ethnicization, if you will, of people of color in the United States as inassimilable foreigners. At the same time, the very act of exploring ethnic identity foregrounds the significance of articulating an aspect of our selves that links us to our families, peers, traditions, transnational histories, and diasporic communities and distinguishes us from the flattening effects of racial categorization. Therefore, producing ethnicity in the United States is in constant flux, negotiating between how we are identified as ethnic and racial subjects and how we identify ourselves as Korean.
Displacement from our ancestral home increases the salience of ethnic identity as something that must be produced and cultivated. In other words, being Korean cannot be predicated solely on originating from the nationstate, Korea, but necessitates further elaborations based on proof of ancestry, family history, and notions of primordial ties. The process of becoming Korean cannot rely merely on quotidian experiences but fosters the teaching and learning of cultural practices that are constructed as Korean in a variety of ways. These processes involve but are not limited to the following: creating communities based on ethnic identification; engaging in popular and traditional cultural practices originating from the Korean peninsula; participating in political activism that affects the Korean peninsula as well as people of Korean descent in diaspora; disseminating our experiences of being and becoming Korean in the United States through public performances; and producing our versions of Koreanness through claiming, commodifying, and constructing new traditions and cultural practices.
In this book, I emphasize the performance of teaching and learning Koreanness as one of the fundamental processes of ethnic identity formation. By looking at various sites that profess to “teach culture” and by looking at young people who seek to “learn culture,” I contend that we can inform the study of ethnic identity formation from a pedagogical point of view. Similar to the ways in which culture is circulated in K–12 settings, initial forays into teaching and learning ethnic identity for my participants are centered on “food, folks, and fun” activities.