Sung-Ae Lee

Lost in Liminal Space: Amnesiac and Incognizant Ghosts in Korean Drama

Some recent Korean TV drama series have developed narratives that centre on amnesiac or incognizant ghosts. Because of their crucial acts of forgetting and miscomprehension, these ghosts may be used to figure the social injustices and repressed traumas that haunt contemporary South Korean society.

Performing Community: A Comparison of Korean-Language Newspapers in Beijing and Sydney

More than six million Koreans now live outside Korea, in 173 countries, according to data released in 2003 by the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Jungang Ilbo 7 Feb. 2004). This number represents 13% of all Korean people and hence constitutes a diaspora of highly significant proportions. As migration from Korea continues, and the number of generations born outside Korea increases, identifiably ‘‘Korean’’ identities both proliferate and diversify. As Stuart Hall argues, identities undergo constant transformations and are ‘‘increasingly fragmented,’’ ‘‘fractured,’’ and ‘‘multiply constructed across different, often antagonistic, discourses, practices, and positions’’ (‘‘Introduction’’ 4). As people with a common ancestry and a shared history follow diverse itineraries of migration, the diasporic identities that emerge are necessarily heterogeneous. Identities are constituted and reconstituted within differing host cultures and are variously marked by a desire to recuperate what has been ‘‘lost.’’ My focus in this essay is on the quite different identities developed by Koreans in Beijing and Koreans in Sydney as a result of the very different social formations, ideologies, and political agendas of each host country; in particular, I will be concerned with the role played by Korean-language community newspapers in this process. Here, I consider issues of the Beijing Journal (henceforth BJ) and the Sydney Korean Herald (henceforth SKH). Allan Bell has argued that