Violence and trauma as constitutive elements in Korean American racial identity formation: the 1992 L.A. riots/insurrection/saigu

@article{Kim2012ViolenceAT,
  title={Violence and trauma as constitutive elements in Korean American racial identity formation: the 1992 L.A. riots/insurrection/saigu},
  author={Rose M. Kim},
  journal={Ethnic and Racial Studies},
  year={2012},
  volume={35},
  pages={1999 - 2018}
}
  • Rose M. Kim
  • Published 9 October 2012
  • Sociology
  • Ethnic and Racial Studies
Abstract This paper proposes a new understanding of race as an artifact constructed from racist violence and the trauma it engenders. The paper applies Jeffrey Alexander's concept of ‘cultural trauma’, i.e. when ‘members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks on their group consciousness’, to the case of Korean immigrant merchants who were victims of violence during the 1992 L.A. riots/insurrection/saigu in Los Angeles, California… 
View on Taylor & Francis
13 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
1
Background Citations
7

13 Citations

Creating a Collective Memory of the Comfort Women in the USA
We offer a new perspective on the recent controversies surrounding the memorialization of comfort women in several American cities by shifting the focus from bilateral historical grievances and…
Rice and Rap: Hip Hop Music, Black/Asian American Racialization, and the Role of the U.S. Multicultural Neoliberal State
This paper explores Black and Asian American racialization within the multicultural neoliberal state. Looking at Los Angeles in the 1980s and early 1990s, I examine the rise of multiculturalism and…
The Formation and Development of the Black Lives Matter Movement: A Political Process Perspective
The “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement is believed to be the largest social movement in American history. Making sense of such a historically significant social movement will certainly enable a…
Coalition building and mobilization: case studies of the comfort women memorials in the United States
ABSTRACT Diaspora politics, coalition building, and the gender rights movement have come together to bring about the unexpected: the public memorialization in the United States of “comfort women,”…
Sa-I-Gu, Twenty Years Later: I Still Love L.A.
This essay looks backward twenty years to the days of violence that erupted in Los Angeles, California, on April 29, 1992, following the acquittal of four white police officers charged with brutally…
'Beyond the loot' : social disorder and urban unrest
The article looks at current explanations for the 2011 English riots. It critiques one dominant view that, beyond the micro-political protest in Tottenham, people primarily participated to loot…
'Beyond the Riots' – Policing in Partnership to Prevent and Contain Urban Unrest
For four days in August 2011 there were widespread public disturbances in 66 locations across the country. Known as the ‘2011 English Riots’, they were estimated to have involved 15,000 participants,…
Solidarity Through Shared Disadvantage: Highlighting Shared Experiences of Discrimination Improves Relations Between Stigmatized Groups
TLDR
Five experiments provide converging evidence that highlighting shared experiences of discrimination can improve intergroup outcomes between stigmatized groups across dimensions of social identity.
Potential Impact of COVID-19-Related Racial Discrimination on the Health of Asian Americans.
TLDR
A general overview of the history of anti-Asian discrimination in the United States is provided, theoretical and empirical associations between discrimination and health are reviewed, and the associated public health implications of the COVID-19 pandemic are described, citing relevant evidence from previous disasters in US history that became racialized.
Entrepreneurship and crisis management: The experiences of small businesses during the London 2011 riots
This article examines the impact of a crisis on small firms. Taking a phenomenological research approach, qualitative interviews were conducted to capture the experiences of small businesses directly…
...
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 40 REFERENCES
A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia
As Freud's privileged theory of unresolved grief, melancholia presents a compelling framework to conceptualize registers of loss and depression attendant to both psychic and material processes of…
Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity
Preface 1. Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma: Jeffrey C. Alexander 2. Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma: Neil J. Smelser 3. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American…
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary…
5. HOME IS WHERE THE HAN IS: A KOREAN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE ON THE LOS ANGELES UPHEAVALS
ABOUT HALF THE APPROXIMATELY $770 MILLION IN ESTIMATED MATERIAL LOSSES incurred during the Los Angeles upheavals was sustained by a community no one seems to want to talk much about. Korean Americans…
The Political Economy of Ethnic Change
An attempt is made to evaluate two theories of ethnic solidarity and change, one functionalist, the other reactive, in the light of quantitatime evidence concerning England and the Celtic fringe from…
Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History
"If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this…
Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War
Since the Korean War—the forgotten war—more than a million Korean women have acted as sex workers for U.S. servicemen. More than 100,000 women married GIs and moved to the United States. Through…
Venus in Two Acts
This essay examines the ubiquitous presence of Venus in the archive of Atlantic slavery and wrestles with the impossibility of discovering anything about her that hasn’t already been stated. As an…
Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots
Preface vii Introduction: When the Strange Erupts in Culture 1 1. Racial Geography of Southern California 27 2. The Black Body in Pain: Rodney King and Strange Days 68 3. Culture of Wounding: The…
The Id, the Ego, and Equal Protection: Reckoning with Unconscious Racism
It is 1948. I am sitting in a kindergarten classroom at the Dalton School, a fashionable and progressive New York City private school. My parents, both products of a segregated Mississippi school…
...
...