Nostalgic for the unfamiliar: Korean Americans’ ‘imagined affective connection’ to the ancestral homeland

Abstract

This article addresses and attempts to reconcile the epistemological divide in recent return migration scholarship (e.g. diasporic return vs. ancestral homeland migration). Relying on interviews conducted with 1.5/2nd-generation Korean American returnees’, this study finds that an orientation toward the Korean peninsula and an abstracted Korean-ness serves as one of the central motivations for their migration to South Korea. I argue that this orientation and cultural affinity toward the Korean peninsula is not proof of a diasporic ontology but rather of a discursive reality promulgated by popular and legal discourses both in South Korea and the United States. Within these discourses, culture and ethnicity are interpreted not as being socially constructed and located but as essential and natural. Whether or not these perspectives hold ontological merit is thus superfluous—the Korean American returnees’ interviewed believe them to be valid and articulate their salience within their own migration narratives. However, this article also finds that possessing an orientation toward a Korean ethnicity and peninsula does not preclude these individuals from eventually negotiating their migratory identities within and against an authentic’ Korean diasporic subjectivity. These findings showcase how Korean American returnees’ both adopt and challenge dominant discourses about ethnicity, nationality, and diaspora through their transnationalism.