"In this book - based on a major conference sponsored by the Overseas Koreans Foundation (OKF) in Seoul in October 2002 - experts hold up South Korea as one of the most dramatic examples of participation in the global economy, having gone from being a poor, underdeveloped country fewer than 40 years ago to becoming a postwar economic success story. This report also looks at South Korea's role as a regional trading partner and its present and future relations with north Korea" -- BACK COVER.

More than one-half million people of Korean descent reside in Japan today—the largest ethnic minority in a country often assumed to be homogeneous. This timely, interdisciplinary volume blends original empirical research with the vibrant field of diaspora studies to understand the complicated history, identity, and status of the Korean minority in Japan. An international group of scholars explores commonalities and contradictions in the Korean diasporic experience, touching on such issues as citizenship and belonging, the personal and the political, and homeland and hostland.

This study presents a perspective on Korea's economic development since the 1960s in the light of domestic and international changes that are forcing Korea to make far-reaching adjustments in its economic policies. Soon Cho is a former Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Korea.

This volume examines the socio-cultural aspects of transnational mobility of the Korean diaspora across the globe, spanning countries such as Japan, the Philippines, Germany, the US, and the UK. The contributors explore gendered migration, social inclusion and exclusion in homeland and hostland, embodied multiple subjectivities and belonging in historical and contemporary contexts, migrants’ work and family, ethnic media consumption, information and communication technology (ICT) in transnational mobility, ethnic return migration, and marriage migration. This work is a strong interdisciplinary and trans-regional study, combining various disciplines such as sociology, gender studies, anthropology, history, theater studies, media and communication studies, and Asian studies.

This book examines theories and specific experiences of international migration and social transformation, with special reference to the effects of neo-liberal globalization on four societies with vastly different historical and cultural characteristics: South Korea, Australia, Turkey and Mexico.

"Korea is one of the last divided countries in the world. Twins born of the Cold War, one is vilified as an isolated, impoverished, time-warped state with an abysmal human rights record and a reclusive leader who perennially threatens global security with his clandestine nuclear weapons program. The other is lauded as a thriving democratic and capitalist state with the thirteenth largest economy in the world and a model that developing countries should emulate. In The Koreas, Theodore Jun Yoo provides a ... gateway to understanding the divergent developments of contemporary North and South Korea. In contrast to standard histories, Yoo examines the unique qualities of the Korean diaspora experience, which has challenged the master narratives of national culture, homogeneity, belongingness, and identity"--

The unification of North and South Korea is widely considered an unresolved and volatile matter for the global order, but this book argues capital has already unified Korea in a transnational form. As Hyun Ok Park demonstrates, rather than territorial integration and family union, the capitalist unconscious drives the current unification, imagining the capitalist integration of the Korean peninsula and the Korean diaspora as a new democratic moment. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic research in South Korea and China, The Capitalist Unconscious shows how the hegemonic democratic politics of the post-Cold War era (reparation, peace, and human rights) have consigned the rights of migrant laborers—protagonists of transnational Korea—to identity politics, constitutionalism, and cosmopolitanism. Park reveals the riveting capitalist logic of these politics, which underpins legal and policy debates, social activism, and media spectacle. While rethinking the historical trajectory of Cold War industrialism and its subsequent liberal path, this book also probes memories of such key events as the North Korean and Chinese revolutions, which are integral to migrants' reckoning with capitalist allures and communal possibilities. Casting capitalist democracy within an innovative framework of historical repetition, Park elucidates the form and content of the capitalist unconscious at different historical moments and dissolves the modern opposition among socialism, democracy, and dictatorship. The Capitalist Unconscious astutely explores the neoliberal present's past and introduces a compelling approach to the question of history and contemporaneity.

K-pop, described by Time Magazine in 2012 as "South Korea’s greatest export", has rapidly achieved a large worldwide audience of devoted fans largely through distribution over the Internet. This book examines the phenomenon, and discusses the reasons for its success. It considers the national and transnational conditions that have played a role in K-pop’s ascendancy, and explores how they relate to post-colonial modernisation, post-Cold War politics in East Asia, connections with the Korean diaspora, and the state-initiated campaign to accumulate soft power. As it is particularly concerned with fandom and cultural agency, it analyses fan practices, discourses, and underlying psychologies within their local habitus as well as in expanding topographies of online networks. Overall, the book addresses the question of how far "Asian culture" can be global in a truly meaningful way, and how popular culture from a "marginal" nation has become a global phenomenon.

The Korean communities in Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires were the first overseas Korean communities that the new Republic of Korea initiated and supported. The initiative was taken to relieve the economic suffering of the poverty-stricken country in the 1960s. Among South American countries that were open to Korean immigrants, Brazil and Argentina attracted the most, which included even undocumented Korean migrants from neighboring countries. The two Korean communities (about 45,000 people in Sao Paulo and 20,000 in Buenos Aires) represent almost two thirds of the Korean residents in Latin America. Over the years, global forces emanating mainly from East Asia, North America, and South America have affected the Korean communities. The intensity and directions of the triangular pulls and pushes have varied, reflecting changing global socioeconomic conditions. This has created tension and ambiguity among the Korean migrant and host communities. Looking at the two communities comparatively, the focus will be on the effects of the global pulls on Korean identity formation, community development patterns, integration efforts, social mobility, education for children, remigration, return migration, and relationships with the host communities. Wherever applicable, the experiences of Korean communities are compared with that of other East Asian communities, namely the Chinese and Japanese in Latin America.

In recent decades, increasing numbers of diasporic peoples have returned to their ethnic homelands, whether because of economic pressures, a desire to rediscover ancestral roots, or the homeland government's preferential immigration and nationality policies. Although the returnees may initially be welcomed back, their homecomings often prove to be ambivalent or negative experiences. Despite their ethnic affinity to the host populace, they are frequently excluded as cultural foreigners and relegated to low-status jobs shunned by the host society's populace. Diasporic Homecomings, the first book to provide a comparative overview of the major ethnic return groups in Europe and East Asia, reveals how the sociocultural characteristics and national origins of the migrants influence their levels of marginalization in their ethnic homelands, forcing many of them to redefine the meanings of home and homeland.