Territorializing the Koryo Saram: Negotiating South Korean Perspectives on Homeland and Diaspora

Abstract

Diasporas are increasingly prevalent as globalization has increased transnational interaction between homelands and host-states. The territorial state as a container of the nation is challenged by transnational interactions of diasporas, although titular nation-states continue to territorialize detached ethnic minority groups within homeland rhetoric. This thesis evaluates diasporic identity and transnational belonging of the Koryo saram – or Koreans of the former Soviet Union – to explore how South Korea utilizes its assumed role as ethnic homeland to expand its economic influence in Central Asia. During the Joseon period (1392-1910) northern Koreans experienced socio-cultural marginalization that encouraged migration to the Russian Far East, and in 1937 the entire Koryo saram population of 200,000 ethnic Koreans was deported to Soviet Central Asia. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, South Korea has made significant efforts to reintroduce nationalized Korean culture and history in order to revitalize the ‘Koreanness’ of the Koryo saram to expand its global economic influence and reinforce political legitimacy on the peninsula, but South Korean government policy does not recognize the Koryo saram as belonging within the Korean ethnos. South Korean primarily maintains interactions with the Koryo saram to infiltrate burgeoning Central Asian economies, diversify its energy needs, and promote the cultural soft power of the ‘Korean wave’ (Hallyu) despite the socio-cultural division between the “homeland” and the Koryo saram diaspora. This separation of the diaspora from a collective myth of homeland and homeland return reveals the “liminal diasporism” of adaptive diasporas in an age of transnationalism and globalization.