Second Thoughts on "Diaspora"

In the second half of the reading from Eleana Kim's Adopted Territory she begins chapter three by delineating the evolving relationship between Korean adoptees and the state of Korea. She explains that the government has revamped its method of dealing with adoptees by enacting a new globalization legislation called segyehwa, "The economic and cultural segyehwa project opened up new legal provisions for adoptees to travel to Korea and stay for extended periods of time...the private education sector created economic opportunities for adoptees to commodify their 'westernization'" (178). The government even went as far as to expand an effort to conjure up diaspora through assisting "overseas Koreans with their economic and social status in their host countries" (179). In expanding the role of ethnicity beyond the national borders, Korea essentially created a "national identity" that is "confounded with ethnic identity" (179). For many adoptees, this posed a challenge to their understandings of their own identities by pitting their biological ethnicity against their western ways of life. This also altered the relationship between the adoptee and the "motherland" in which the Korea became, "a distinctly modern transnational projection of the nation that naturalizes and sentimentalizes the presumed to be biological and emotional ties that adopted Koreans must feel for the nation" (181).

This process of creating a long distance ethnonationalism is also present in Professors Geraldine Pratt and Brenda Yeoh's work Transnational (Counter) Topographies when they explore the efforts of nation states to expand patriarchal norms through a process that Pratt and Yeoh term "long distance nationalism" (162). They explain the effects of this "long distance nationalism" as a way in which nation states with transnational citizens have extended dual citizenship thusly "reclaiming diaspora in this way has the effect of redefining the meaning of nation, reviving... the equation of nation and race: 'blood ties rather than national territory'" (162). This system has gone on to expand patriarchal symbolism through “traversing transnational space seems to be a hegemonically masculinized enterprise where men and women remain complicit in the reproduction of patriarchy beyond national borders” (162). This is in addition to what Eleana Kim identifies as the nation state’s abuse of the use of diaspora by throwing out “the constructivist definition of diaspora in favor of one promoting cultural nationalism based on a notion of primordialism” (181). In forcing the notion of the centrality of an ethnic relation to Korea as a central element of these adoptees identity, the state is expanding nationalism in an effort to expand investment into an economically struggling Korea. Kim identifies the specific abuse of the term “diaspora” by noting, “More and more, diaspora becomes an emotional and ideologically-loaded term that is invoked by disparate transnational groups as a way to construct broad ethnic coalitions that cut across national spaces” (182). The political usage of the notion of diaspora becomes likened to that of ethnicity or identity constructing its own discursive rhetoric “from which social actors draw to make political claims to recognition and belonging in both essentilizing and cosmopolitan ways” (182). Finally, diaspora is used by political actors to accomplish a transnational politics and process instead of a sense by which individuals expand an understanding of their own personal identities. Kim concludes on the term, “diaspora ceases to be a purely descriptive category and instead enters into a politicized and positioned set of representations.