Inspired by the recent growth of interest in the United States for Asian American drama and dramatists, this dissertation investigates nine contemporary Korean American theater and performance works that depict the diasporic experience and identity--works that also express Korean cultures, history, and memory both in the United States and South Korea. Rooted in the interdisciplinary realm (Theater and Performance Studies, Women's Studies, Critical Adoption Studies, Asian American Studies, and Korean Studies), this study reveals how the Korean diaspora is configured, diversified, and complicated within performance spaces, as performing bodies remap the actual experience, history, and imagination of immigration as well as transnational adoption. My argument is that the performances of the Korean diaspora constitute a site of liminal belonging that not only transgresses the ethnic and national demarcations, but also transforms the politics of identity in the twenty-first century. Delving into the experiences of Korean diasporic families, women, and adoptees embodied in theater and performance, this research thus contends that liminal belonging of the Korean diaspora intersects with, and incorporates, the social constructs of race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and kinship in such a way as to restructure and reimagine the meanings of society and community across the Pacific.

This edited volume analyzes the Korean diaspora across the world and traces the meaning and the performance of homeland. The contributors explore different types of discourses among Korean diaspora across the world, such as personal/familial narratives, oral/life histories, public discourses, and media discourses. They also examine the notion of “space” to diasporic experiences, arguing meanings of space/place for Korean diaspora are increasingly multifaceted.

Since the Korean Wara the forgotten wara more than a million Korean women have acted as sex workers for U.S. servicemen. More than 100,000 women married GIs and moved to the United States. Through intellectual vigor and personal recollection, Haunting the Korean Diaspora explores the repressed history of emotional and physical violence between the United States and Korea and the unexamined reverberations of sexual relationships between Korean women and American soldiers.

A wide range of performing arts and practices of the Asian diasporas across the world are examined by scholars of Asian studies, theatre studies, anthropology, cultural studies, dance ethnology and ethnomusicology.

Abstract: This study contributes to understanding diaspora and its music cultures by examining the Korean genre of p'ungmul as a particular site of continuous and dynamic cultural socio-political exchange between the homeland and the host society. As practiced in Los Angeles and New York City, this genre of percussion music and dance is shaped by Korean cultural politics, intellectual ideologies and institutions as p'ungmul practitioners in the United States seek performance aesthetics that fit into new performance contexts. This project first describes these contexts by tracing the history of Korean emigration to the United States and identifying the characteristics of immigrant communities in Los Angeles and New York City. While the p'ungmul troupes developed by Korean political refugees, who arrived during the 1980s, show the influence of the minjung cultural movement in Korea, cultural politics of the Korean government also played an important role in stimulating Korean American performers to learn traditional Korean performing arts by sending troupes to the United States. The dissertation then analyzes the various methods by which p'ungmul is transmitted in the United States, including the different methods of teaching and learning p'ungmul---writing verbalizations of instrumental sounds on paper, score, CD/DVD, and audio/video files found on the internet---and the cognitive consequences of those methods. The ways in which immigrants teach and learn p'ungmul have brought standardization to performance practices and enabled Korean American p'ungmul practitioners to learn performance styles currently popular in Korea. This project shows the culture of p'ungmul in the United States to be highly flexible, as Korean American performers utilize different performance instrumentation, repertoire, and aesthetics depending on different audiences, performance venues, aims, and performance contexts. Depending on where they are performing or for whom, they alternate between highly virtuosic and dramatic performance techniques and attempts to re-arrange traditional existing repertoires. In tracing the common performance practices and instrumentation found in different p'ungmul groups in the United States, this project ultimately reveals how different conceptualizations of p'ungmul according to different age groups and across professionals and amateurs affect performance practices and aesthetics.

By bringing the plays together in this collection, Esther Kim Lee highlights the themes and styles that have enlivened Korean diasporic theater in the Americas since the 1990s. Some of the plays are set in urban Koreatowns. One takes place in the middle of Texas, while another unfolds entirely in a character's mind. Ethnic identity is not as central as it was in the work of previous generations of Asian diasporic playwrights.

In this book, scholars from disciplines like anthropology, history, linguistics and philology engage with the subject of how Koreans who live outside Korea had to (re-)define their own distinct cultural life in a foreign environment. Most Koreans in the diaspora define themselves through their ancestry, their language and their religion. Language serves as a strong argument for defining one’s own identity within a multi ethnic society. Ethnic Koreans in the diaspora tend to cultivate their own very special dialects. However, since the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of China, most ethnic Koreans in Central Asia, Manchuria and Siberia came again into close contact with Koreans especially from South Korea. There is a certain desire amongst many ethnic Koreans to learn the standard Korean language instead of sticking to their own dialects. This volume investigates constructions of Korean diasporic identity from a variety of temporal and spatial contexts.