Page 99 of my dissertation, Diasporic Bodies in Unification Time, falls in a chapter tracing the migration journeys of North Korean women and their children before their arrival in South Korea. Many of these children are born from coercive reproductive arrangements between North Korean women and Chinese men, are raised in China, and later arrive in South Korea as teenagers. There, these youth encounter a social world in which they are repeatedly cast as emblems of a future united Korea, despite varied personal interest in the state-building project of unification.

Early on in my fieldwork, I noticed that South Korean educators, NGO workers, bureaucrats, and church leaders referred to the work of supporting North Korean migrants as “advancing” or “preparing” for unification. These emblematic readings emerged both in interactional discourse and institutional forms of representation. Across state policy, media campaigns, church ministries, educational programs, and NGO initiatives, North Korean-background migrants are described primarily through terms such as meonjeo on tongil (“first to come of unification”), jageun tongil (“small unification”), and tongil injae (“unification talent). My research examines how these expressions, along with other acts of performance and construal, circulate across institutional settings and come to naturalize the North Korean-background migrant as an enregistered emblem of Korean unification (Agha 2007).

Page 99, which details the sexual exploitation, trafficking, and selling of North Korean girls and women seeking to cross the Chinese border, may seem removed from the dissertation’s broader concerns. Yet, these backstories highlight what the process of enregisterment leaves behind. The histories of exploitation, violence, coercion, and displacement that brought North Korean migrants to South Korea are obscured in the semiotic economy of unification. By juxtaposing these migration histories with the discourse of unification, the dissertation asks how political futures become communicable through people, and what inequalities are obscured in the process.

References

Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.