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A review by stusahn
Haunting the Korean Diaspora by Grace M. Cho
5.0
Cho’s chilling experiment with the residual memory, silence and trauma of the Forgotten War left me reeling in its wake. Taking an affective and psychoanalytical lens, Cho fuses creative and autoethnographic vignettes with sociological research to provide the field a new way of seeing the unseen. In doing so, she exorcises the ghosts of the shameful and unspeakable, revealing how the psychic aftershocks of past violence (both emotional and physical) bleed into the social present experienced by the Korean diaspora today. As the grandson of one of the Korean American families brought together by the war that Cho describes, I took a lot away from this book as it made me realize certain truths about my own family as we mourned the passing of halmeoni this month. The shared history and familial experience today must be something attributable to that which resides in the diasporic unconscious as Cho calls it. It was such a personal read that hit the soul. The book is a must read for children of the Korean diaspora grappling with family history and for social scientists seeking to rupture the rationalist and empiricist hegemony of modern social sciences through experiments with the figure of sociological ghosts as well as creative and affective ways of knowing.
* I’ve read the family’s discomfort with Cho’s portrayal of their family in this book and the ethical questions it raises for social science standards. This review is only based on my own reading as a student, understanding that the individuals represented in the book are fictional composites of real people who experienced real events. This means that they are personalities compiled together to sketch the sociological realities of the diaspora, giving space for exaggeration and inaccurate facts about real individuals.
* I’ve read the family’s discomfort with Cho’s portrayal of their family in this book and the ethical questions it raises for social science standards. This review is only based on my own reading as a student, understanding that the individuals represented in the book are fictional composites of real people who experienced real events. This means that they are personalities compiled together to sketch the sociological realities of the diaspora, giving space for exaggeration and inaccurate facts about real individuals.