Mediating Diasporas and Fandom: Second-Generation Korean American Adolescent Diasporas, Identification, and Transnational Popular Culture

Abstract

Research on second-generation diasporic reception practices is rare, and it is the goal of this article to continue the nascent inquiry on multiple-generation diasporic audiences. The complicated ways in which diasporic identity is negotiated allows for greater understanding of the border zones that multiple-generation diasporas inhabit. Fully acculturated but not fully included, second-generation diasporas infuse their identities with meanings drawn in part through reception of transnational popular media and the development of fan communities. For Korean Americans, it is a way of identifying with a transnational home identity that allows for counterhegemonic identification. Boundaries of fan communities, however, exclude as well as include. Intraethnic taste hierarchies define what counts as authentically ethnic and who counts as sufficiently Korean.

Acknowledgments

This work was presented to the Minorities and Communication Division, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Denver, Colorado, 2010.

Notes

David C. Oh is now with Ramapo College of New Jersey.

¹I use Georgiou's (2006) definition of diaspora as decentralized, scattered persons who maintain community through communication. Diasporas, in her explanation, refer to intermediate places between the local and the global that are marked by multiple belongings to “home.”

² Interpretive communities is a term used by Fish (1976) to refer to groups that “ … are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions. In other words these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read … ” (p. 483). The work of media scholars such as Morley (1980) and Ang (1990) are frequently cited as pointing to interpretive communities who make readings based on their social identities, resisting postmodern slippages of meaning by noting that our group identities lead to shared readings. For more recent scholarship that references this concept explicitly, see Means Coleman (2002) and Mitra (2010).

³ I use the gender distinction of boys and girls to mark the intersection of gender and age.

⁴ Conducting a study that allowed participants to access online ethnic resources would have the benefit of allowing viewing choices to be guided primarily by participants’ interests and tastes. In a study of fan behavior, this would be especially useful in gaining direct insight into fan practices with media. It would, however, shape the nature of the study by shifting the focus to online fan activity rather than offline fan activity and group membership.

⁵ Intertextuality refers to reading a text through knowledge of other outside texts. It opens possibilities for polysemy and pleasure (Fiske, 1987).

⁶ I have retained the use of Korean when they are directly written by participants. For transliteration of Korean, I use the Revised Romanization system for consistency. However, I maintain the Romanized names of celebrities as they are promoted internationally.

⁷ Neoliberal views of racism refer to the endorsement of the belief that structural racism is no longer a significant barrier in the lives of people of color and, thus, suggests that racism is acting on race, not being “colorblind.” Therefore, any and all actions motivated by race are deemed racist. This includes choosing ethnic media, intentionally choosing coethnic friends, and a variety of other social decisions that are shaped by participants’ ethnoracial identity.