1
A criminal may improve and become a decent member of society. A foreigner cannot
improve. Once a foreigner, always a foreigner. There is no way out for him. He may
become British; he can never become English.
--- George Mikes, How to be an Alien (1946)
The movement of people is linked with movement of culture, and the movement
of culture is linked with movement of ‘who we are’—our identity. Since globalization
has been the dominant word of the 20
th
century, everything ‘moves’ as Appadurai
categorizes the fluid disjuctures with five frameworks—ethnoscapes, mediascapes,
technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes (Appadurai, 1990). In this era of mobility,
nothing seems to be really fixed and so does identity. While I could not agree more with
Stuart Hall’s idea that identity is not ‘being’ but ‘becoming’, I would like to argue that a
very traditional values and ideas of nation-states still have a huge impact on the
configuration of globalization. In any discussion of globalization and identity, the
migrant experience is often at the center of the attention because the diasporic figure
symbolizes both the mobility and an inherent homelessness that comes with globality
(Shome and Hegde, 2002). How then do identities matter in the dynamics of
globalization where the role of nation-states has been changed? In order to highlight the
dialectics, I will explore cultural and political discourses surrounding a Korean
singer/entertainer who once was an idol and then suddenly became a national traitor and
even a criminal due to his positioning identities. This case study will provide a very
unique example of immigrants, which I will call Yoen-uh-jok, a group of salmon. These
are the people who have a double experience of diaspora--returning to their ‘origin’ after
a period of displacement from it. In this paper I will discuss on the ways in which the
double diaspora exemplifies dynamic relationships between media industry, media
Convention