남자, 몸, 폭력 그리고 이산(離散)정체성의 정치학

The Male Body, Violence and the Politics of Diaspora Identity

Just as shown in a film <Yellow Sea>(2010), Korean ethnic diaspora from China is considered disruptive as much as they appear to destabilize the economic order of Korea. Whether it be true or not, they are regarded illegal immigrants, cheap day labourers, black market racketeers and organized crime gang members. But at the center of disorder that Korean ethnic diaspora from China returning to their motherland creates is the contradiction of Korean national identities. Since the formation of Korean national identity began to emerge throughout the Japanese colonial rule, the liberation, the Korean War and the division of the North and the South, without unifying force of the nation that could set the boundaries of the land, the people, the political system and the law, its development has taken diverse directions. In fact, what the return of the diaspora brings back is a piece of the development in the past, which may not be in agreement with what the Korean identity, a basis of the democratic and capitalistic nation, is about now. Violent disruption in the text <Yellow Sea>, in terms of the pervasive violence that ruptures the flow of the text, is symptomatic of the clash between the past and the present of the Korean national identities. As Frantz Fanon asserts in his book Black Skin and White Masks(1952), the national identity for the country in and out of the colonial experiences forms in a process of the realization that propels the nation from being ruled to the self-governing. Following Lacan's theorization, he suggests that this is a transformation of the other to the subject. However, this appropriation of the dichotomous relationship of the subject and the other by the colonial subject is not one directional. To the goal of the self-governing, the national can take diverse tactics that result in the various forms of the natinal identity. The diversity in the national identity is a burden to the countries, no matter how much they are determined to the independence, as well as a source of contradiction that undermines the wholeness of the national identity. The fragility of a post-colonial country like Korea lies in the past of different national identity that keeps coming back as in the return of the Korean diaspora.