Korean immigrant (trans)nationalism: Diaspora, ethnicity, and state -making, 1903--1945.

Abstract

The objectives of this dissertation are twofold. First, it documents the changing strategies of political participation among Korean immigrants in the U.S. during the period between 1903 and 1945. Second, it traces the development of national and ethnic identities among Korean immigrants over the same time period. Through a detailed narrative of Korean immigrant involvement in the diasporic state-making efforts of the Korean independence movement, I seek to unite these two thematic threads. In doing so, I reveal the ways in which politics and political participation constituted sites for the construction of Korean-American ethnicity. Through their involvement in the Korean nationalist movement, Korean immigrants came to demand the recognition and fair treatment of their interests and status abroad as well as in the U.S. In this manner, they sought political membership as ethnic Americans in the public sphere. In effect, Korean immigrants not only pursued the recognition of Korea's national sovereignty, but also the recognition of Koreans as a distinct ethnic group in U.S. Korean nationalism thus facilitated the development of a collective identity as ethnic Americans. By engaging with political structures and institutions in the U.S., Korean political participation enabled Korean immigrants to define their own sociocultural identities. Accordingly, this dissertation argues that Koreans were engaged in a process of ethnic identity formation that allowed them to become a viable political entity within the workings of the U.S. liberal state. The circumstances of colonialism and exile necessitated that the Korean nationalist movement create a sovereign national state entirely from abroad. However, the challenges of defining and achieving coherent political action under the conditions of statelessness and exile constrained the ability of the Korean diaspora to establish a sovereign political institution of its own. Due to these limits in diasporic state-making, the development of a collective identity as ethnic Americans reflected the unconditional acceptance of U.S. sovereignty as fundamental to Koreans achieving their national goals, leading to what some have characterized as a neocolonial relationship with the U.S. in the years during and following World War II.