The Review of Korean Studies
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ISSN : 1229-0076
The Return of the Returnee: A Historicized Reading of Adult Overseas Adoptees “Going Back” in South Korean Cinema
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Abstract
This article concerns itself with representations of adult overseas adoptee returnees in South Korean cinema since liberation until the present/2015. Attempting to historicize these, it questions how the adoptee returnee—as a gendered and ethnoracialized figure—comments on text-embedded ideologies of Koreanness and kinship at different moments in time. It argues that adoptee returnee representation, as deployed in male-authored nation narration, has evolved in consolidation with the socio-economical, ideological and political circumstances of the day. The first part of the article traces the adoptee returnee figure as it first appeared in the films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. With the booming South Korean economy in the 1970s, the adoptee returnee figure largely disappeared from the silver screen and was “replaced” by representations of adoptees within their adoptive countries. Since the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 and the official declaration of the New Multicultural South Korea in 2005/2006, the adoptee returnee has reappeared as a salient and refurbished figure in the cinescape, which can be considered as “a return of the returnee” (thus the title). The second part of the article offers a closer reading of returnees and family reunion discourse in postmillennial films.
- keywords
- South Korean cinema, Koreanness, intercountry adoption, diaspora, Return Migration
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