Unmoored Subjectivity: Diasporic Subjectivity in Postcolonial Border Crossing

-----

Focusing on the case of Kim Dong-hee, a military deserter who fled from the Korean military training camp in Busan to Japan in 1965, Shin explores how individuals of postcolonial Korea reacted to the new forms of subjectivation. Under the new Korean state, subjects, on the one hand, became the objects of the newly establishing power relations, but were simultaneously under tenacious influence of previous subjectivities and the ways of living under colonialism. Shin argues that the postcolonial subjectivity of Koreans was inherently diasporic, not only in the sense that the population were faced with spatial readjustment through the decolonial processes and outbreak of war, but also diasporic in their subjectivity, as one could no longer return to the precolonial Korea, or Joseon. Amid the ongoing crises of colonialism-liberation-division and war and postcolonial state-building, crises and events are in a continuity which compels individuals to adapt and survive to the ever-shifting conditions, and the present becomes a “stretch of time” as Laurent Berlant puts it (2011). Under such stretch of time, incessant border-crossing through the waters becomes the modality of surviving and finding a better “home” and imagining a collective outside of the nation-state. Shin argues that displacement and subsequent construction of diasporic subjectivity is never a passive act of survival, but rather an active seeking and remaking of the political and social collective one chooses to belong to in that “elongated durée of the present” (Berlant 195). Working with affect theory and diaspora studies, Shin traces how individuals move along with other diasporic populations—in Kim’s case, Zainichi Koreans, Jeju islanders and other colonial subjects scattered along the Pacific during and after colonialism—who could only exist by treading between the waters.

Light lunch provided.

-----