Utopian Performatives Matter

Abstract

The Korean diasporic community in Japan has long been othered in their host country. At the same time, despite being ethnically Korean, their overseas marginalized status has been largely met with indifference and an absence of solidarity from South Korea, a country with a long-held fetish for ethnic homogeneity. Yakiniku Dragon (2008) is a play written and directed by Korean/Japanese theatre-maker Chong Wishing based upon experiences of the diasporic community in Japan, including his own diasporic memory as well as postmemory. In this article, I examine how the (post)memory of the Korean/Japanese diaspora is dramatized and transmitted to the audience through this play. I argue that staged memories lead the audience to experience a ‘utopian performative’ – an emotionally and aesthetically intense moment in theatre spectatorship – and the intersubjective experience of the past and continuing reality of these geographically and emotionally distant ethnic Koreans invites contemporary non-diaspora South Koreans to develop and share an empathetic memory of the Korean diaspora. The alternative form of memory – prosthetic memory – acquired through Yakiniku Dragon, I suggest, plays a significant role in bridging the emotional distance between those who have neglected and those who have been neglected, creating a solidarity with the diaspora.