Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review

This special issue of Cross-Currents—“Diasporic Art and Korean Identity”—is the fruit of a two-day conference on “Korean Diaspora and the Arts” held at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in May 2017. The contributors explore new delineations of the political, social, cultural, and emotional landscapes inhabited by Koreans living in diaspora. Korean diasporic artists investigate the meaning of “Koreanness” through their paintings, political cartoons, theater, film, documentary, photographs, and multimedia art. This special issue on Korean diasporic art presents creative expressions of a shared history of trauma, suffering, or displacement, affectively reconstructed or nostalgically reimagined, produced in China, Cuba, Japan, Kazakhstan, South Korea, and the United States. The contributors demonstrate how artists are particularly able to captivate audiences and innovate ways of articulating the multiple aspects of the everyday condition of diasporic existence in situ. In this sense, art possesses the potential to lead us beyond dichotomies. In particular, Korean diasporic artists’ experiences and expressions pose questions about the North and South Korean states’ efforts to manage and understand cultural belonging that have, in turn, worked to homogenize Korean identity.