| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Homi Bhabha (1990) wrote,
The relationship between nation and narration that Bhabha posited can be analyzed in two interrelated ways: he looks at how nations invent narratives and how narratives contribute to the invention and imagination of the nation. This hermeneutic analysis of nations and narratives complicates the idea of the nationstate and of nationalism. The metonymic/horizontal transverse of narratives of historicity acts in concert with the metaphorical/vertical instantiations of symbolisms that are created through fictions of the nation. Therefore, through the passage of time, the idea of the nation is transformed by the fictions created about the nation, and the transformations in turn affect the production of narratives, thus the national identity keeps reinventing itself.
This notion is further explored by Timothy Brennan (1990) who interrogated the “myths of the nation” with particular reference to narratives of developing nations. Borrowing from Mikhail Bakhtin, Brennan argued that the rhetoric of the nation is often portrayed in the genre of the epic that lays out a specific trajectory for aggrandizement and superiority of the nation. Such narrative trajectories that seek to elevate the position of one nationstate in relation to all others trace historicity in terms of a modernizing teleology, especially as a way of inventing new histories and narratives as strategies to break from colonial hegemony.
People of Korean descent in the United States are addressing the myths of two nationstates simultaneously: the discourse of race, ethnicity, and multiculturalism that circulates in the United States and the discourse of cultural nationalism that is deployed globally to people of Korean descent in diaspora through various -scapes (Appadurai, 1996).