Diasporic Bodies in Unification Time: Citizenship, Faith, and Schooling in Transnational Korea

Noël Um-Lo

In contemporary South Korea, “North Korean defector youth” are celebrated by state actors as symbols of national unification under the constitutional claim that North and South are one. Yet, in recent years, most so-called “defector youth” were born not in North Korea, but in China. Born to North Korean mothers—many of whom migrated to China through coercive reproductive arrangements—and Chinese fathers, these children often arrive in South Korea as teenagers with little personal stake in unification. Still, they are recast as “defectors” in state ceremonies, media portrayals, NGO initiatives, and schools. What does it mean, then, when the “defectors” who are made to embody the promise of Korean nationhood have few cultural ties to the peninsula—and many never defected from the North at all? Although legally naturalized and processed through the Ministry of Unification, these youth are excluded from the housing, welfare, and education subsidies reserved for those born in the North. Their ambiguous status reveals how unification operates not only as a symbolic project, but also as a regulatory apparatus organizing the differentiated forms of citizenship available to transnational migrants. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic research in schools, churches, and NGOs, this dissertation examines how the distant future of Korean unification is made material and advanceable through the disciplining of North Korean-background subjects to state and religious temporalities. Following Jane Guyer’s (2007) understanding of prophetic time as a present attached to a distant future, I illustrate how state and civil society actors in South Korea address the gap between the present and a unified future Korea by cultivating a condition of perpetual readiness located primarily in the bodies of North Korean-background subjects.

About Noël Um-Lo

Dr. Noël Um-Lo is a political anthropologist whose research examines education and religion within the North Korean diaspora across China, South Korea, and the United States. In addition to the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, Dr. Um-Lo's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation’s Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant in Cultural Anthropology and the Teachers College Dean’s Grant for Student Research. Dr. Um-Lo's writing has been published in City & Society, Anthropology & Humanism, Migration Information Source, the Journal of Asian Studies and Current Issues in Comparative Education. She earned her Ph.D. in Applied Anthropology from Columbia University, an M.A. in Anthropology from Columbia University, and a B.A. in Social and Political History from Carnegie Mellon University. Beyond her academic pursuits, Dr. Um-Lo is a poet, dancer, and mother, who deeply enjoys spending quality time with the young people in her life between New York City and Seoul.