Korean Americans’ Silence and Articulation: Sa-I-Gu as Re-Visioning America = Korean Americans’ Silence and Articulation: Sa-I-Gu as Re-Visioning America

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper attempts at reading and analyzing Sa-I-Gu, a documentary video featuring Korean American's testimonies concerning the LA disturbance, as Korean American's re-visioning the meaning of America. I will explicate how Korean Americans as the in-between minority articulate the disturbance, breaking the silence imposed by the discursive system of media representation. The documentary video Sa-I-Gu collects various interviews with Korean Americans speaking about the L.A. disturbance. In response to the mainstream media's construction of “Korean American” as a model minority, the interviewees articulate their grief, loss, anger and the memoir - from the time of their arrival on American soil, their subsequent struggles to make their American dream come true, to the moment of disillusionment of their dreams. Their testimonies vividly explain how American racism gave a rise to Korean American nationalism within the American context. This paper concludes that Korean American's nationalistic consciousness of this sort - rather than falling into a pitfall of ethnocentricsm - would be the very site in which Korean Americans could encounter intersubjective desires for cultural hybridization.