Description
Book SynopsisBy examining privileged and highly skilled Asian migrants, such as international students who acquire legal permanent residency in the United States, this book registers and traces these transnational figures as racialized transnational elites and illuminates the intersectionality and reconfiguration of race, class, ethnicity, and nationality. Using in-depth interviews with Korean international students in New York City and Koreans in South Korea as a case study, this book argues racialized transnational elites are embedded in racial and ethnic dynamics in the United States as well as in class and nationalist conflicts with non-migrant co-ethnics in the sending country. Sung-Choon Park further argues strategic responses to the local, social dynamics shape transnational practices such as diaspora-building, transfer of knowledge, conversion of cultural capital, and cross-border communication about race, causing heterogeneous social consequences in both societies.
Trade ReviewSung-Choon Park’s Korean International Students and the Making of Racialized Transnational Elites presents a vivid and illuminating account of how young elites from South Korea are marginalized as foreign students in the United States through racist practices, and how they navigate profound status inconsistencies in their daily lives, online and off, in Korea and the United States. Park presents a striking account of his subjects’ worlds as he illustrates a great deal about the race and racism, class formation, and media and globalization in South Korea, the United States, and far beyond.
Table of ContentsChapter One: Global Academic Hierarchy and Transnational Social Reproduction
Chapter Two: Imperialist Racial Formation and English Language
Chapter Three: A Balancing Act of Ethnic Dis/Identification Intersecting Class and Race
Chapter Four: Conflicts over Conversion of Cultural Capital and Transfer of Knowledge
Chapter Five: International Students' Cross-Border Transmission and Translation about Race and Racism
Chapter Six: New Diasporic Nationalism as the Politics of Racialized Transnational Elites
Chapter Seven: Digitally-Mediated Transnational Lives and Tactical Uses of New Media
