Although he has a Vietnamese mother
Like you, this child is Korean
[He] cannot have a meal without kimchi
Admires King Sejong
Thinks Dokdo is our territory
Shouts out ātae-han-min-āgukā when watching a soccer game
[He] will join the military when he turns twenty
Will pay taxes and vote
Like you
Support multicultural families to nurture happiness for tomorrow (Hana Financial Group 2008)
This 30-second TV commercial shows an elementary school boy born to a Vietnamese mother and a South Korean father eating kimchi, writing an essay in Korean, showing his classmates his drawing of the Korean national flag on the peak of Dokdo, and ardently cheering the South Korean soccer team. A female narrator reads the passage above as the commercial visualizes him performing Korean(ness).
This ad aired on national TV in 2008 as part of a campaign sponsored by Hana Financial Group to promote social awareness of the increasing numbers of multicultural families in South Korean society. The ad urges (all) South Korean citizens to reconsider their general perception of multicultural families by directly calling out the audience as āyouā and proclaiming that this Vietnamese-Korean boy is just as Korean as you are. The ad assures audiences that this biracial child is Korean not only because he is performing traditional Korean cultural practices but also because he will sincerely commit himself to the duties expected of Korean citizens, such as paying taxes, serving in the military (a duty expected of men), and voting. The ad is intended to be inclusive, demonstrating that multicultural families are rightful members of Korean society. But the commercial never tells the viewer exactly who is Korean or what constitutes Korean(ness), nor addresses this unresolved question of what it means to be ethnically Korean in an era of global migration.
Only a few decades ago, South Korea (hereafter, Korea) represented itself as racially homogeneous through the myth of the āsingle-ethnic nationā (tanil minjok) (Han 2007; Shin 2006) . Yet this well-known myth no longer seems to hold the same weight as in the past. In recent years, Korea has experienced drastic growth of its foreign population due to substantial global migration flows. The total number of (legal) foreign residents in Korea tripled in the last decade, growing from 536,627 legal residents (1.1% of the population) in 2006 to 1,741,919 (nearly 3.4% of the population) in 2015 (Korean Statistical Information Service [KOSIS] 2016). Moreover, the number of mixed-race /blood 1 children born to international marriage s experienced an eight-fold increase during the same period, growing from 25,246 in 2006 to 207,693 in 2015 (KOSIS 2016). These remarkable statistics indicate that Koreaās āfaceā is rapidly changing, challenging traditional understanding of Korea as racially homogenous.
Since the 1980s, neoliberal restructuring of the global labor market accelerated global migration. The rapid transition to privatization created a new class of āprecarious workersā in temporary or contract jobs (Shin 2013). To fill a gap in low-skilled labor created by neoliberal restructuring , the aging of its population, and the nationās low birth rate, Korea welcomed a large number of temporary guest workers from abroad, particularly from other countries in Asia. Since the late 1980s, Korea has transformed from a labor-sending country into a labor-importing country. In the early years of Koreaās liberalization, the workers who migrated to Korea were mostly men, but these were followed by a wave of women migrants in the mid-1990s who took various migration paths as mail-order brides , contract marriage migrants , and labor migrants in the sex/entertainment industry or in restaurants (see Constable 2005; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003). Alongside the āfeminization of global migration,ā international marriage between Koreans and Asiansāusually between a Korean man and an Asian womanāhas rapidly increased since the 2000s. Accordingly, children of multicultural families , born to this increasingly visible pattern of international marriage between Korean men and Asian brides, have emerged as a distinctive form of mixed-raciality in contemporary Korea. The social integration of the growing number of children of multicultural families quickly became an important governmental agenda, and the Korean government subsequently embraced multiculturalism to manage its immigrant population and to renew its national identity in accordance with these social transformations.
The multiculturalism agenda is more than just a governmental policy to regulate Koreaās growing immigrant population. It is also a part of a larger social transformation into a neoliberal, global Korea that encompasses all sectors of societyāfrom labor relations to family to popular media culture. The TV commercial described above precisely captures this moment of transformation. In the ad, Hana Financial Group, a member of the market, not the state, was the actor that mobilized multicultural subjects to call for an open and multicultural global Korea. Indeed, Hana Bank offered a special financial program targeting multicultural families by offering an installment savings account with a higher-interest earnings rate than a regular account.
In addition, the adās use of the image of an ordinary Vietnamese-Korean boy to promote multicultural sensitivity is not unique. (Tele)visual representations and social discussions of multicultural/multiethnic subjects (tamunhwa juchāe) including multicultural families, female marriage migrants , mixed-race people, and ethnic Koreans , have become quite common and explicit in Korean media and popular culture since the mid-2000s. These representations expand the discursive space for imagining a new multicultural global Korea. This substantive increase in the multiculturalism discourse since the mid-2000s is symptomatic of struggles over racial reconfiguration and signals broader social transformations in Korea, including the neoliberal restructuring of social orders and units.
Considering multiculturalism as a mediated discourse of popular culture and public policy, this book studies how the increase of visual representation of mixed-race Koreans formulates a particular national racial project of neoliberal multiculturalism in contemporary Korean media. In this study of the Korean racial project, I do not treat neoliberalism as a master discourse that explains every current transformation on a national and global scale. Instead, I conceptualize neoliberal multiculturalism as occurring at the intersection of the neoliberal restructuring of the global order and the national reshaping of the racial order. To critically engage with the burgeoning power of multiculturalism as a (new) national-building project in postcolonial and neoliberal Korea , I interrogate how visual culture mediates our perception of multicultural reality and shapes racial thinking in Koreansā daily lives.
Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in South Korean Media considers televisual culture and its derived discourses as meaning-making sites where cultural meanings of racial difference and Koreanness are continuously shaped and negotiated. I argue that Korea used to consider itself as a āpure-blood ā society, but its blood is now mixed within neoliberal capitalism. New multiethnic Koreans are now born in Korea and mixed-race/blood Koreans who exist elsewhere (e.g., in the West) represent Korean national identity and allow Korea to retain its (ethnic) nationalism even across national boundaries. Therefore, Koreanness is now not necessarily geographically tied to Korea but extends beyond national boundaries, while nevertheless bolstering nation, nationality, and nationalism in the process.
This book presents four case studies that demonstrate particular aspects of neoliberal multiculturalism in contemporary Korean media. Rather than pull random case studies of mixed-race figures in Korean popular media, I approach each case study as what I call ātelevised racial momentsā that articulate different layers of cultural politics. Within these moments, gender, race, class, and sexuality intersect and produce multiple ruptures where the nationality, citizenship , and ethnicity enter into conflict and are reshaped. Specifically, these televised racial moments are cultural sites for the production and contestation of mixed-race Koreans whose (visual) presence demands a new imagining of what it means to be a Korean in the era of globalization . They are symbolic figures whose racialized (televisual) images become the cultural sites where neoliberal ethics are narrated and taught in the form of entertaining commercial media. Because the visual images of and discussions about these cases were produced and circulated at the national level, each demonstrates a unique aspect of the racial formation of neoliberal multiculturalism in contemporary Korean media culture.
Specifically, I take celebrity culture and reality TV as two areas for analysis because they vividly picture different logics that enter into play when the Korean media appropriate racial differences. I question why biracial celebrities born to an American parent and a Korean parent are likely to be celebrated and commoditized while mixed-race people born to one Korean parent and one (Southeast) Asian parent appear only in the documentary genre or on reality TV. The first part of my analysis focuses on televised racial moments that show how both black and white Amerasian celebritiesā racialized bodies become the meaning-making sites where blackness , whiteness , and (global) Koreanness is contested and negotiated (Chaps. 3 and 4). Unlike those celebrity-driven moments, however, it is crucial to note that a biracial Korean with a (Southeast) Asian parent has never risen to celebrity status in the Korean televisual landscape but has been chosen and elevated through reality programs. Considering reality TV as a neoliberal television genre, the second part of my analysis examines particular moments where mixed-race children and their multicultural families are formulated as a neoliberal subject(ivity) in the realm of reality TV (Chaps. 5 and 6). I attest that the reality TV genre offers particular cultural languages, grammars, and logics to address racial relations and the struggle for Koreanness. Through a close reading of those four cases, the book demonstrates how the complex articulation of the stat...