Hana Lee
Prospectus
Re-examining the ‘Heartland’:
Korean American religious and ethnic identity formations in the Midwest
Introduction
Scholarship on religion in Korean America has explored gender politics in the church, transmission of culture to the second generation through religion, the function of ethnic identity in the church, the role of the church in Korean America, its history, and religiosity amongst the second generation. Scholars, largely from sociology and history, have researched and examined the meanings of such aspects of Korean American identity for decades, and recognized its importance in better understanding who Korean Americans are and how that is shaped by religion. However, these explorations largely study Korean Americans in areas highly populated by Korean Americans, many having ethnic enclaves and enterprises. One area of research that some scholars pose as areas for further study, that has not been adequately addressed, is whether these arguments hold true where Korean Americans do not have access to co-ethnic populations and communities. Park (2013) suggests, “Further research should consider exploring these patterns in other contexts where Korean Americans are fewer in number, and where the opportunities to find a marital spouse with the same ethnicity or participate in a second-generation congregation are scarce” (p. 133). Similarly, Kang et al. (2010) writes about the need in future research to look at Korean American youth who have little exposure to ethnic communities (p. 460). This is also a critical time in Asian American studies where questions of regionalism are being asked and explored. The Association for Asian American Studies’ 2015 annual conference in Evanston, Illinois will be “The Trans/national Imaginary: Global cities and racial borderlands,” where one of their proposed questions is “How have their settlement patterns shifted the spatial imaginary towards not only of the urban but also the suburban and rural? How do Asian/Americans and Pacific Islanders transfigure the “heartlands” of American into “borderlands[1]”? I mention this to point out another way, in academic institutions, fields are redefining not only where immigrant and racial minority groups are today but also what their identity formation processes are like in these unexplored spaces.
It is clear this void of research is being identified as one that would be important to analyze. These questions are still unanswered, and we still do not know how the proportion of Korean Americans in the local population affects processes of identity formation and ethnic religious practices and identities. Therefore, I plan to study these processes in the Midwest, where Korean immigrants make up a smaller proportion of the local population. My research aims to fill this void and explore Korean American religious identity where Korean Americans are not as highly populated as areas such as Los Angeles or New York, where much of the literature currently focuses. My central research questions are concerned with ethnic and religious identity, how place and population affects this dynamic, and what the consequences of these processes are: How do Korean American Christians in the Midwest understand and experience the intersection of religious and ethnic identity? How does being in the Midwest affect ethnic and religious identity formation and practices compared to this population where there is greater access to co-ethnics?
To answer these questions, I will be employing an interdisciplinary and qualitative (discussed later) approach. Providing an interdisciplinary lens provides a way of “seeing the whole instead of just the disciplinary parts. A wider perspective would merge limited, specialized concerns and identify inter-relationships” (Klein 1990: p. 95). American studies is an interdisciplinary field that has a long tradition of centralizing discussions of race, class, and gender with social justice and activist motives. Thus, taking existing discussions from the sociology of religion and Asian American studies, and applying an American studies mindset and approach will add necessary depth to the meaning of these topics. Framing this research with questions that challenge boundaries of identity formation with a critical approach to methodology will further current discussions of religion and identity.
At this moment, I take a step back to present how my dissertation project was conceived as a contribution to this new sociology of religion in American Studies. This project has been informed by personal experiences and observations just as much as academic endeavors and scholarly texts. As an undergraduate student, the central question that led to my senior thesis was, how and why is it that at least at one point in their lives, nearly all of the Korean Americans that I knew, and that my friends and family knew, had some connection to Christianity or the Korean church, regardless of whether they identify as Christian or not?
My own observations led me to believe there was something more to this question than what met my eyes and mind. And at this point, I did not have the intellectual tools to name these processes I observed and experienced. Taking Professor David Yoo’s[2] course on Asian American History and Professor Albert Park’s[3] course on Modern Korean History helped provide a historical context to my literary training, of the earliest connections between Korea and Christianity through American missionaries, which helped to partially answer this question. As an English major, I then took my understandings of these various connections from Korean American history and modern Korean history to the landscape of Korean American literature: how was Christianity portrayed in Korean American texts? How was it described, what role did it have in the lives of the various characters? What purpose did it serve? I attempted to answer such questions in my undergraduate thesis, which spurred me towards my American Studies Master’s thesis: “The Reception of Free Food for Millionaires: De-Centering the Academy via Amazon.”
The question that my undergraduate thesis could not directly answer because of its singular approach was: what did the literary portrayals say about lived experiences of Korean Americans themselves, and how was this perceived by the readers both ethnic Koreans and non-Koreans? This is where reception studies became an effective tool, and I began thinking beyond the humanities and started looking to the social sciences. Privileging the voices of the readers themselves through an Internet medium in this Master’s thesis, and my personal experiences of traveling to Korea for two months the subsequent summer, helped me to recognize that the types of questions I wanted to ask had changed. While I was in Korea, the types of questions I wanted to ask were really about investing in the lives of the people around me, on issues of national identity, meaning, belonging, authenticity, in all its various forms. Being in a nation I partly identified with and partly felt estranged from, illuminated these identity related questions. Furthermore, as a Korean American, I was curious as to which of these experiences carry over through immigration to Korean America. My process of thinking and what I desire to further explore is a product of these central experiences, but not limited to them. As I currently stand, my research synthesizes these various experiences through a different method than I started my academic journey with: hearing and listening to the voices of the community I hope my work will serve, the Korean American Christian population in the Midwest.
Identifying the Problem
At this point, little is known about how the proportion of the ethnic population will affect the lived experiences of that ethnic population. It is evident that the Korean American population has much to add in terms of the intersections between religiosity and ethnic identity, because of the history[4] of the role of religion in Korea, in emigration and how that has shaped this population in America contemporarily. However, it is important to address which pockets of the Korean American populations have been studied, and which have not. Warner (2005) elaborates on why the Korean immigrant population is distinct compared to other new immigrant (post-1965) populations: “Perhaps the most distinctively religious new immigrant group is Korean Americans, half of whom, as sampled by Hurh and Kim (1990), report premigration membership in Christian churches but another quarter of whom affiliate with Christian churches after arriving in this country. By 1988, Korean immigrants had established some two thousand congregations in the United States” (p. 33). While significant research has been conducted on Korean Americans, primarily qualitative studies on the east and west coast[5] (Alumkal 1999, Kang 2010, Kim and Kim 2012, Kim 2010, Min 2010, Min and Kim 2005, Park 2013, Yoo 2010), minimal studies have been done on Korean Americans (and Asian Americans, generally) in the Midwest, nor on areas where Korean Americans would not be amongst a significant co-ethnic population.
Drawing attention to these proportionally less populated areas from the perspective of ethnic and religious identity is important because it points out how religious and ethnic practices and identities are shaped by social surroundings. It leads to the possibility of acknowledging the different types of ethnic and religious identity formations and how co-ethnic populations can influence them as well, adding to the literature on segmented assimilation. It is asking for the consideration that Korean Americans, and potentially other racial and ethnic minorities, who do not have access to large ethnic populations may not identify, or live out these identities, in the same ways as those that do. Rubin and Rubin (2012) emphasize that strong studies “are fresh because they don’t merely imitate what someone else has published; instead, they explore new issues or present old problems in a new way” (p. 60). Looking at Korean American Christians in the Midwest presents old ‘problems’ or questions in a new way because of the location of the population and the facets of identity that will be examined there. Much existing research in this area is dependent upon the fact that the scholars in this field were able to collect qualitative data because of the concentrated population of Korean Americans in the area, which lends itself to more visible and easily accessible representations of this community in various areas. This is precisely what is not prevalent in the Midwest, which means the performance of ethnicity and religion is very likely to appear differently and have meaning that must be distinguished from others. Additionally, because of the much smaller population, this speaks to the proximity between co-ethnics as well as the proximity between these populations and religious spaces. These physical and geographical distances are also possible factors to explore the effects of space on religious participation and faith.
Therefore, this proposal is for a study that will be conducted in the Midwest, the unpublished and academically unexplored. Because of the American imaginary of the Midwest as the “heartland” and “Middle” America, Sarmiento[6] (2013) argues that, “this dominant cultural imaginary of the interior US not only whitewashes the region’s settler colonial history and evacuates the presence of people of color, but it also deters Asian American Studies scholarship from moving past the West Coast” (p. 1). In line with Sarmiento’s new work, this project also hopes to contribute to these new directions that redefine the Midwest and Asian American identity.
Emphasis on space and place not only speaks to a theoretical significance but also to a methodological significance. The methodological significance of this work is about identifying tensions and creating ways to work through them. Lury and Wakeford (2012) write, “It is not possible to apply a method as if it were indifferent or external to the problem it seeks to address, but that method must rather be made specific and relevant to the problem. In short, inventive methods are ways to introduce answerability into a problem. Further, if methods are to be inventive, they should not leave that problem untouched” (2-3). Sarmiento (2013) also speaks on methodology, “this demographic paucity engenders different concerns and methods for studying the diversity of Asian American experience” (3). The process of data collection in this research may allow opportunity for further invention of methodology, and will likely change as more interviews are conducted. Because data has yet to be collected, it is not yet guaranteed how methods will be shaped as the interaction between researcher and respondents progresses. However, I do acknowledge the possibility and flexibility of employing and redefining methodologies for this project as it progresses. The theoretical and methodological significance of this work will speak to how region (environment) and social structures (race, ethnicity, religion) affect identity formation, thus pointing to the importance of not excluding the Midwest from the sociology of religion, studies of immigration, and Asian American studies.
Literature Review
Race, Ethnicity, Assimilation
Two crucial aspects of identity are fluidity and asserted versus assigned identity. Nagel (2004) writes, “The location and meaning of particular ethnic boundaries are continuously negotiated, revised, and revitalized, both by ethnic group members themselves as well as by outside observers” (p. 152-153). Thus, there is a constant negotiation of identity that is constantly multi-directional from within and without. Fenton (2003) argues that any discussion of race, ethnicity or nation (which continually intersect) must be contextualized, that the layers to these various aspects of identity cannot be productively discussed without acknowledging context, and in fact, we must consider the consequences of viewing identity out of context (p. 179). Due to the history of slavery and immigration in the United States, race, ethnicity, and culture are often used interchangeably, sometimes mistakenly. While ethnic identity can be informed by culture and national origin characteristics, race (through institutions such as the Census Bureau) is often assigned and imposed. The racial privilege of whiteness in the United States has permitted this population the option to choose their ethnicity, and when they choose to employ ethnicity (Nagel 2004). Other racial minorities are not afforded the same privilege because of skin color and the enforced association of skin color with socioeconomic status, morals, and personalities.
Unlike Fenton, Omi and Winant (1994) centralize race in understanding the various dimensions of U.S. society, viewing the nation and its components through this lens of race. Many have debated about the centrality of race in the United States, and in particular, whether in fact socioeconomic status would be more accurate. Still others argue for an intersection of race and class (Waters 1999). Another dimension to discussions of identity formation, is the authenticity of identity, within which the key question is who has the power to determine one’s authenticity. Cheng (2004) approaches this same topic through various communities in the United States, including Asian Americans. He argues that no singular racial or ethnic category is sufficient for defining who Asian Americans are because of the multiple overlapping and mixtures of identity (interracial and transnational Asian adoption, multiracial individuals, interethnic and interracial marriages, the black/white binary in racial discourse, etc.), blurring the boundaries of who is in and who is not (Cheng 2004: 143). In his book, Cheng (2004) ultimately raises questions about the anxiety over somehow losing an authenticity of identity, and challenges the complexities of how authenticity is defined and determined, and by whom.