1st Edition
Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women Diasporic Daughters
This book explores the unstudied nature of diaspora among young Korean, Japanese and Chinese women living and studying in the West. Why do women move? What are the actual conditions of their transnational lives? How do they make sense of their transnational lives through the experience of the media? Are they becoming cosmopolitan subjects? Exploring the key questions within their particular socio-economic and cultural contexts, this book analyzes the contradictions of cosmopolitan identity formation and challenges the general assumptions of cosmopolitanism. It considers the highly visible, fastest growing, yet little studied phenomenon of women’s transnational migration and the role of the media in everyday life, offering detailed empirical data on the nature of the women’s diaspora. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, sociology, cultural studies and anthropology, the book provides an empirically grounded and theoretically insightful investigation into this evolving phenomenon.
1. Transnational Migration, Media and Identity 2. Mapping the Diaspora: A Global-Historical Perspective 3. Female Individualization? 4. Diaspora: Lived and Experienced 5. Diasporic Nationalism and the Media 6. Female Cosmopolitanism? 7. The Nowhere Women: Feeling Stuck in Diaspora
Biography
Youna Kim is Associate Professor of Global Communications at the American University of Paris, France. Her books are Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea: Journeys of Hope (2005, Routledge); Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia (2008, Routledge); Women and the Media in Asia: The Precarious Self (2012, Palgrave Macmillan).
"Those who are interested in or studying globalization, transnational mobility, and global media, should greatly benefit from Transnational Migration. Kim does a great job in pushing the reader to rethink many of the familiar concepts (based on Euro and male-centric perspectives) that have remained unchallenged for a long period of time. With the growing influx of international students from East Asian countries to the United States and United Kingdom today and with more than half of those being women, this book will be regarded as highly relevant to understanding the lives of many young transnational Asian women and pertinent issues in their transnational experiences."
–Journal of Communication Inquiry, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2012"Kim’s work challenges the general assumptions of cosmopolitan identity formation and highlights the role of the media in triggering transnational movements. I believe that this book makes an important contribution to the field of international migration research. Much research to date has considered women as mere dependents of male migrants, and Kim’s work convincingly demonstrates that the lives of women on the move in today’s globalized era are socially constructed, as opposed to a popular belief that these women pursue lives of their own choice independent of the reality of any particular society."
–Discourse & Society, Vol. 24, No. 1, 2013"This book presents extremely important findings about the transnational student experience as well as some provocative arguments on concepts from individualization to cosmopolitanism and nationalism. It should be required reading for anyone interested in gender, media and cultural globalization."
–Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2013
