Transnational Seminar

Close-Knit Kin, Korean America, and the U.S. University

February 11th, 2005 3:00 PM

Room 336 Lincoln Hall

Description: From Author: In this paper I argue that Korean Americans are torn between the celebration of the liberal individual whose development proceeds unfettered by any meaningful difference and the importance of ethnic family and community in the face of the racialized realities of the United States. I dub this a contest between liberal multiculturalism with its comfortable ethnic differences, and racialized difference; I also appreciate that this liberal individual was a central feature of the cosmopolitan modernity that propelled many South Koreans to emigrate. With a focus on college students and their parents, I bring this contest to the American university where it takes a particularly legible form as a struggle between the promise of the value of a liberal education and a college degree posed against a more critical and racialized understanding of the engine of American higher education and employment. As such this paper considers the tense relationship between ethnic family and the U.S. university. I explore this contest through the extended kin talk, namely the talk about vital kin ties both in and beyond the nuclear family, of one extended Korean American family in Chicagoland.

Full Text of Paper (pdf)

Speakers: Nancy Abelmann, Anthropology, UIUC

Biography: Nancy Abelmann is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has published books on social movements in contemporary South Korea (Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement, University of California Press, 1996); and on Korean America (Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots, with John Lie, Harvard University Press, 1995). Her co-edited volume with Kathleen McHugh, South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and Nation is in print at Wayne State University Press. Currently she is completing The Intimate University: College and the Korean American Family, based on 4 years of transnational ethnography on the educational trajectories of Korean American public college students as they articulate with the educational histories of their migrant parents. She has received two campus grants with psychologist Sumie Okazaki to study Korean American adolescents and their families.