UC San Diego

The dominant narrative of diasporic Korean American history has been founded upon on the narratives the Korean Independence Movement from the continental US and Hawai‘i. It centers the leaders and participants of the movement who began to mobilize diasporic Korean Americans towards a predetermined path of assimilation into US society and global cosmopolitanism – a political subjectivity that reinforces both US and Korea nationalisms. By extension, evocations of the Korean diaspora in academic discourses have also tended to reify territorial, ethnonational, and political boundaries to standardize a singular definition of the Korean diaspora centered on migration, ethnic identification, and connection to the homeland.

By contrast, “A different Diaspora” argues that such renderings tell only a partial story by historical tracing various political struggles of diasporic Korean Americans throughout the 20th century (1903-1968) who challenged narratives of compliance and assimilation defined by diasporic Korean American proximity to whiteness. Through their actions, these exiled militarists, scholars, students, and GI deserters of the US armed forces made apparent the limitation of their proximity to whiteness by imagining a different Korean American diaspora removed from the norms of subservience to white American institutions and individuals in positions of power. By placing them at the center of my story, my dissertation argues for a wider conception of the Korean diaspora that accounts for overlooked narratives such as the cultivation of cross-racial solidarities; development of critical understanding of antiblackness, Indigenous dispossession; and participation in projects of demilitarization to resist US imperialism. These enactments of an alternative worldmaking in the Korean American diaspora, practiced however fleetingly, reveal that notions of belonging are not confined by boundaries set by nation-states or the status quo of the racial-social order in the US. This dissertation thus traces what I call insurgent histories of the Korean American diaspora, focusing on how various diasporic Korean Americans at different times and places sought alternative forms of liberation and belonging. It is a genealogy of how diasporic Korean Americans came to understand and imagined beyond their proximity to whiteness to envision a different Korean American diaspora.